AMD FX-8150 Black Edition CPU Water Cooler Review

Temperature Testing Results

With the FX-8150 running at 3.6Ghz (200×18) the stock air cooler does an ok job, quiet at idle, gets a little noisy as things heat up. The AMD water cooler in silent mode is just that silent. Its beat by the Corsair H100 on low. The H100 come in at 48*C, 6 degrees cooler than the AMD water cooler. Head of the chart is the Corsair A70. It got the job done at a nice 42*C, but it was way noisier than either of the water coolers in their respective low speeds.

Turning on the Turbo option the chart is almost a repeat. The Corsair A70 ran a little warmer, lets do some overclocking.

First stop is where I was able to push the FX-8150 on stock air and the system not shut down due to thermal throttling, and 4.4 Ghz was that level. AMD said 4.6 GHz across all cores on air, we missed it by just a hair. I bumped the water coolers to their “high” speeds. The AMD water cooler still keeping the temps under 60*C, the Corsair H100 still slightly ahead of the AMD water cooler, and the Corsair A70 is loosing ground and barely holding the lead.

So I continued until I could not get a stable overclock when running Prime95. That ended up being 4.8Ghz, which isn’t bad for full stability on all eight cores. The Corsair H100 leads at 71*C, followed by the AMD water cooler at
77*C, and in last the Corsair A70 at 78*C. Of the 3 coolers, the Corsair
H100 is the quietest.

We could disable cores, switch power supplies and add some fans to help cool the motherboard VRM area, but this is a CPU Cooler review and not an overclocking guide. We will focus on an article that focuses on overclocking one of these down the road!