FX-8120 or Phenom II X4 980? - Page 11

Kinda funny how AMD has a habit of weak IMC's. There is a more than noticable difference between my 955 (4.0Ghz 24/7 stable) @stock CPU-NB vs 2800 CPU-NB.

I do have a question for you though. On denab's and thubans you can also improve stability in most case's by upping the CPU-NB voltage and clock's, Dose this also apply to BD chips too?

ok once i get my mobo, ill post what i have it running at... pretty sure i have mine running just as fast as a 980 or faster. i had it on a budget board and with STOCK cooling i had it going at 3.7Ghz. yes i might have different needs from my system (a mix of ACAD and Inventor, along with another 200GB of games). i have a 200 GB partition just for programs and games and it had 5GB free LOL. I think of my 8120 as a woodchipper not a BD (hell BD is already taken too! called blu-ray disk). What i mean is this thing with no throttling and no c1e or any other POWER MANAGEMENT (the 2 words i hate the most) I can tell you one thing though... either way, 980 or 8120, its sure better than my handicapped intel setup (Q9400 that couldnt OC even 50MHz!)... AMD 4 LIFE *walks out to get that tatted up* lol. I have noticed something a little weird and i dont mean to keep typing and typing but IF its down to the wire,

getting an 8120 BD isnt future proofing yourself. GO onto GOOGLE (or your favorite search engine) and search "Bulldozer CPU"... you find that they gonna have a 3RD GEN out in 2015. and also when the items hit the shelf they 6 months old.

i really think you should get an 8120. yes a 980 would perform better stock. it runs at 3.7Ghz where as an 8120 stock runs at 3.1Ghz. but i got mine stable on all cores at 3.7Ghz stock HS (yes its loud and yes im fixing that today as well.)

PROS: 8120 will eat advanced renderings like its nothing (just wish i could have it chew up my friends brother and spit em out lol)
ANY program that you run will just be tore appart by this thing.
Multasking (league of legends running in BG along with vent and 9 windows of IE9(sucks btw, crashes on every system i have. gotta thank MS for such a masterpiece). Nothing brings the system to its knees. ive tried to run as many things as i can and it even sat through LinX for 6 hours. once i get my Sabertooth 990FX and a new HS, im sure itll hit 4GHz easily on air. (reminder, dont be like me where you just throw it up to 3.7Ghz with everything on auto. manual OC's ALWAYS unless you are me. i am just saying this so people cannot blame me for blowing up their rig and having their house start fire).

CONS: waiting for others to finish loading
8120 is $35 more,
HOT! HOT! HOT! It requires an AFTER MARKET HS unless you wanna fry an egg on it. You were warned. Also the Stock HS has a whining to it when its running.
You ALSO have to worry about the SOCKET TEMP!!! this is different than core temp (either of these hitting 61C is going to kill it (not sure about the 980).
YOU ARE NOW PART OF A BETA to improve the 2nd and 3rd gens.
Turbo is not efficent and reduced performance (on my system atleast) again could just be that budget board since it was only a 4+1 power phase. ill post back when i get my sabertooth.

EDIT: Sorry for the long post but i hope that it helps you pick whats right for you. This is all in my experience with it which is a matter of 4 days now. I can now say, intel can go to hell. Sorry if anyone takes offense but seriously AMD is more bang for the buck and sorry but i refuse to pay $300 for a CPU that would be outperformed my a CPU i bought for half the price... Either way, as long as you stay with amd, it cant end bad. only thing intel has on AMD is the fact that intel chips run cooler with the stock HS. (once again not a big deal since i always get an aftermarket. Stock is just WAY too loud for either brands.)
Edited by JNielson - 5/4/12 at 9:41am

Have you purchased your CPU yet? If not take a look at the thread where we're comparing AMD CPU's (AMDSLUGITOUTORAMA 2012). For gaming at stock speeds you're really only going to see a difference of 5%. As for the other everyday type of tasks you can compare and see. With video conversion, which tends to be something more and more people are doing, is something that BD is spectacular at among others.

Also on stock cooling with an 8120, 4.0GHz is a very mild OC that won't increase your temps much at all if any.
(8120 results will be posted on the comparison charts tonight since I just got those in).
Edited by Bubba Hotepp - 5/4/12 at 9:45am

Oh yeah. If anyone in here has a 980 we still need those results for comparisonin my thread. Come join in the fun.

I don't know my friend as I don't own a FX yet. But I do only know that higher memory bandwidth can only be achieved by increasing IMC's frequency. And obviously this must apply on FX too, however I admit that FX already gives more bandwidth than Phenom II, but unfortunately FX have low IPC. Similarly Phenom II lacks memory efficiency while they have more IPC performance than FX. This is total Chaos. AMD really need to fix these issues now. With higher memory bandwidth I experience faster response time, faster explorer performance, low DPC latency, faster application load time, more minimum frame rate.

uhm i call BS. at 3.9Ghz i had my self executing batch file kick in. it was at idle... basically cuts power immedietly since max temp is 61C! the truth is you NEED an Aftermarket HS and then 4.0Ghz is a mild one.

You dont want to OC with a stock cooler on this. With it at STOCK SPEED it hits 55C only 6C away from possible damage done to the chip. PLUS it is loud! ive done it if you dont believe me then listen to this guy and go fry your chip or better yet just go dump so nice fresh tap water on your rig...

"wont increase temps at all if any." well would you believe a 15C increase? o btw i should mention STOCK VOLTAGES so this chip is a beast but does get rather hot so go invest in a GOOD cooling method. WC or Air doesnt matter. Youll get an insane OC so easy. just NO CLOSED WATER SYSTEMS unless you have a small case. I mean geeze most of us HAVE a case that is big enough to mount a REAL WC system, if you cant afford a true system then go with air. youd be suprised what you can get with that

Max temp of 61C on the cores at idle?? That sounds like a bad chip to me.

*edit - as far as closed loop water cooling goes, I didn't hit 61C on the cores in my 6100 with an H50 closed loop WC until I had it at 4.8GHz with a load V of 1.5V and a CPUTIN temp of 60C (you can see it in the screenshots on my overclocking thread).
Edited by Bubba Hotepp - 5/4/12 at 10:40am

not idle man. thats under load. it can handle a 4.0Ghz OC but you get into some games and its gonna hit that. and really? an H50? first time i ever heard of someone saying something good about closed loops. my buddy had an H80 (i dont remember the model. just that it was corsair). Hose split and fried the whole rig... talk about unlucky. i guess thats why i dont want to use a closed loop. id put more faith into something i put together...

At stock, the Deneb is going to win on anything that's not deeply multithreaded. Unless the FX can use all of its eight cores, a Bulldozer at 3.1 is like a butterknife in a gunfight compared to a Deneb at 3.7.

But do you really intend to buy one of those and not overclock it? That changes the whole game. The Deneb doesn't have much headroom, but the Bulldozer does. If price wasn't an object and those were my options, I'd choose the 8120 and overclock to 4.5.