Will someone with a AMD 8150 please post here

i see what your going for. you want to try to make it a 4 core for gaming.

im pretty sure the architecture wouldnt allow that for one.


you probably should have just gotten a 4100 which is the quad core.


so in short, based one what i know about the amd fx series...no, you cant disable


also, its not "AMD not being good at anything above quad"

thats all cpus my friend. if your going to be gaming you wont use anything over a quad core. sounds like you want to be future proof, but be current at the same time. heck, get a AMD fx 6100, 6 cores.. you wont need 6 or 8 if you are only gaming with it. the reviews show stock because thats the best way to get a good even review. intel is better than amd, we all know that. its amd's price point that is awesome. i personally have an i7 2700k.

the beauty with AMD, you can disable a core and up the others more, no idea if it's the same with intel as i've only ever had AMD  

I don't own the fx-8150 but these should be the correct steps.

1) Go into bios and turn off four cores.

2) Reboot into windows and see if there are only four cores enabled (task manager)

3) Shutdown and boot back into bios and begin overclocking.

yeah i know the steps   And how to overclock. I'm asking because i'm wondering weather to upgrade my 970 or not >.<

Overclock your 970  

i have hahaha, its a nice 4.1 from i cant even remember the stock XD

cmon cmon surely there's someone out there that's done it?

Your overclocked 970 will outperform the fx-8150 (turned down to four cores) No point of upgrading.

You can do the same with Intel CPUs.



Not worth it. Most games stop benefiting from clock speeds beyond 4-4.5GHz. Buying a FX-8150 to disable and overclock only 4 cores is a waste. Stick with what you have until at least AMD releases Piledriver or until you are ready for a completley new system and see what you need then.

For most games, you will be GPU bottlenecked before CPU bottlenecked.

And you have to remember, you will be turning off modules more than anything so doing so with a FX-8150 will be the same as buying a FX-4100 which is not quite as powerful as a Phenom II quad since the second core of a module only gives about 80% of a second core in performance.

and after reading that, ill stick to what i have, untill piledriver, and get my PCI HDD in the post on monday instead  

Thankyou  

Not exactly the same as a 4100. With an 8000 series chip, you could disable the second core on each module and that would give a performance boost over 4 core/2 module. It is about 10% IPC increase that way. Don't know if that changes the equation much, but its worth noting.

indeed, i think the best option will be to hang for the 2nd gen and get that  

I recall some benchmarks that turned off the 2nd core of each module, giving 4 cores.

|1-ON|2-OFF|3-ON|4-OFF|5-ON|6-OFF|7-ON|8-OFF|

The problem was the core is still powered so the overclocking headroom didn't raise very much at all.

When a full module is turned off it's off completely. You get more power savings and greater overclock.

|1-ON|2-ON|3-ON|4-ON|5-OFF|6-OFF|7-OFF|8-OFF|

This one benched better even with the SMT penalty, due to higher overclock.

fantastic, the answer i was looking for. Do you remember any of the numbers?

I have managed to overclock my FX-8150 by disabling one core on each module. I was able to over clock the processor to just under 5GHz on a Corsair H100 with the maximum temp of 61C with a load. I ran multiple system benchmarks with the CPU and received a better rating with the four core processor with every test. The reason I find this to be true is that since one core at each module are disabled you are allocating more cache to that core instead of sharing it with another core. One of the main problems with the FX-8150 CPU was memory sharing between the two cores which would slow down the clock speed. This is no longer the issue when disabling one core per module. The chip I received was a lower binned chip because it has some temp issues not allowing me to go much higher on the voltages and my motherboard will not let me go over 5GHz due to the HT/NB frequencies. I recommend doing this with the FX-8150. I have also noticed my Windows loading time has increased signifiantly and now loads before the Windows loading screen comes together.
One last thing, the memory scores at the same GHz as the eight core has jumped quite a bit once disabling the cores. I am not sure why, but I think it has do with the available bandwidth from the cores to the RAM sticks. I hope this helps!

Joel Howard