AMD FX-8150 Processor Review – Bulldozer Arrives

AMD FX-8150 CPU Overclocking

Overclocking greatly varies due to what hardware is being used and
who is doing the overclocking. Always remember that no two pieces of
hardware will perform the same, so our results will differ from what you
might be able to get.

AMD said that you should be able to hit 4.6GHz on the AMD retail boxed CPU cooler and 4.9GHz on all of the cores. To try this out we gave it a shot was used for
overclocking, so we’d expect this overclock to be easily reached by anyone!

The AMD FX-8150 starts off at 4200MHz in ‘CPU Max Turbo’ mode, so it should be that hard to get to 4.6GHz or 4.9Ghz right? The FX-8150 starts off with a base clock of 200MHz
with a multiplier of 21. All AMD FX series processors feature an unlocked multiplier, so you can both lower and raise the multiplier in the BIOS. You can also adjust the base clock frequency to better dial in the overclock. Since we were time limited we overclocked by just using the multiplier to see how far we could push our processor.

To overclock the FX-8150 processor we wanted to put it under water, so we broke out the Corsair Hydro H100 liquid water cooling kit to see what this processor could do. AMD says that the FX series processor has a max suggested temperature of 61C and we all know that will be hard to keep under. AMD also suggested not going over 1.55V on the VCore when running water cooling.

With everything left to default in the BIOS and by just raising the multiplier up to 24.5 and then increasing the VCore up to 1.45V we were able to reach 4916.6MHz with Turbo disabled. This means that all eight cores were running this fast.

The benchmarks at 4900MHz were impressive as we were able to hit 8.04 pts on Cinebench R11.5 when running all eight cores. When run at stock speeds we saw a score of 6.01 pts, so this is an improvement of 33%! In x264 HD we averaged 148 FPS on pass 1 and then 49 FPS on pass two, which blew away the 121 FPS on pass 1 and 37 FPS that we saw in pass 2 with the FX-8150 running in stock form.

We tried our very best to get 5 GHz stable one afternoon, but we were unable to get it stable across all of the cores. We were able to run short benchmarks like SuperPi 1M or things like that, but Prime 95 and Cinebench would throw errors. We tried to run the FX-8150 at 1.60V, but the platform did not like that and never got past the post screen. To our surprise we were able to reach 4900 Mhz on the FX-8150 with the aid of the Corsair Hydro series H100 water cooler and that is exactly what AMD said all cores would likely hit with water cooling! With more time and experience with this platform we are certain that it has more left to offer, but with just an afternoon dedicated to overclocking that is the best that we could come up with.

Reaching 4900 MHz with full stability on the FX-8150 is a great overclock though considering the standard clock speed of this processor is 3600MHz. If you look at it like that, this overclock is 1300MHz!