AMD Bulldozer review thread.

If you have a decent quad core CPU you will be fine until the next generation of consoles comes out. Even a Q6600 OCed to 3GHz is fast enough* for anything except that silly Metro game and SupCom.

*games generally will stay at 60FPS and drop below that only every now and then, and even during the drops things remain perfectly playable.
 
homerdog said:
If you have a decent quad core CPU you will be fine until the next generation of consoles comes out. Even a Q6600 OCed to 3GHz is fast enough* for anything except that silly Metro game and SupCom.

*games generally will stay at 60FPS and drop below that only every now and then, and even during the drops things remain perfectly playable.
Click to expand...

Words can't describe how many wrong things are in that post....
 
Ill keep you informed of how many more new games ye olde Q6600 runs more than adequately. ;)
 
It'd be accurate to say it depends on the game. I believe that GTA4 still has speed problems, and that is a popular game still.
 
GTA4 has speed problems on everything, no ? Anyway it's not a very well optimised game.

Let's be honest, a good q6600, event @stock 2.4 is still doing good. Yeah it got destroyed by news cpu, by that doesn't mean you can't play with it, especially with multithreaded game. Yeah you will only have 25fps in heavy heavy scene instead of 45, for a few seconds, and 55-65 instead of 127.3 otherwise ...

Anyway, each one of us know what is enough FOR HIM. I want to replace my q6600 by a xeon 1230 and 8gb of ram, I'll will gain a lot in gaming, folding and converting stuffs. But eh, for the time being it's about being reasonable...my q6600 is still doing the job a way I can enjoy it.

Sorry again for my english.
 
Anyways. Is it just me or have the Bulldozer based Opteron CPUs gone missing in action?
(conspiracy) Could this have something to do with stability issues of the desktop Dozers? (/conspiracy)
 
I.S.T. said:
The stability issues of desktop BD are still to be properly confirmed, no? It's just two games last I heard.
Click to expand...

I´d go as far as to say they are still to be properly investigated and I find that quite odd. I heard report of Portal 2 BSODing as well but haven´t heard of anyone confirming that one. In fact, I don´t think anyone with a reasonable list of steamworks games and a BD have tried a big list of games and reported back.

That said, at least those two games not running have been well enough confirmed with many enough reviewers but not with many enough combinations of hardware to confirm that it is indeed the processor that is the cause even though Phenoms with same components other than the processor seem to have no problem.

edit: Also I have a single report that Deus Ex: HR crashes even with a version that has CEG disabled and core configuration does not matter: (1CU/1C, 1CU/2C, 2CU/2C, 2CU/4C, 3CU/3C, 3CU/6C, 4CU/4C, 4CU/8C all crash)

Make a register hack though to make the game think the cpu is of K12h family and you may even get to menu or even to game and crash just a little later...
 
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swaaye said:
Ill keep you informed of how many more new games ye olde Q6600 runs more than adequately. ;)
Click to expand...

Rootax said:
Let's be honest, a good q6600, event @stock 2.4 is still doing good.
Click to expand...

A Q6600 is rubbish, That's like saying an Athlon 2 x4 is good enough, While that is true if you're running 4870/4890 power level hardware.

Anything over that and you'll get dire performance, Single digit minimum frame rates, Piss poor SLI/CF scaling. Low average and max frame rates.

People don't understand just what a difference a fast CPU makes, And for the whole it'll only be single digits for a few second argument that's rubbish, You play CryEngine 2, X-Ray Engine and any other dual threaded game engine and your frame will be constantly low.

As I said any card above 480/4890 level performance is wasted except for the odd game, But even the power hungry games benefit from more CPU power.

Metro 2033 scales with CPU cores and CPU clock, Even in GPU limited situations.
 
almighty said:
A Q6600 is rubbish, That's like saying an Athlon 2 x4 is good enough, While that is true if you're running 4870/4890 power level hardware.

Anything over that and you'll get dire performance, Single digit minimum frame rates, Piss poor SLI/CF scaling. Low average and max frame rates.

People don't understand just what a difference a fast CPU makes, And for the whole it'll only be single digits for a few second argument that's rubbish, You play CryEngine 2, X-Ray Engine and any other dual threaded game engine and your frame will be constantly low.

As I said any card above 480/4890 level performance is wasted except for the odd game, But even the power hungry games benefit from more CPU power.

Metro 2033 scales with CPU cores and CPU clock, Even in GPU limited situations.
Click to expand...

I beg to differ. Q6600 benefits massively going from 4870 to 5870. You can really feel the difference, especially when playing at full hd and higher resolutions. I do think though that much of the advantage there is from having more graphics RAM (I don´t have experience of using 4890...) I was playing some Need For Speed game at the time when I did that upgrade and suddenly I was able to play at 2560x1600 with AA instead of 1920x1080 noAA. Same for Red Alert 3. I can not stress enough what a difference it is to be able to play at native resolution instead of scaled down blurryness.

Don´t really have hard data to back this off other than Vantage compare though: http://3dmark.com/compare/3dmv/256165/3dmv/1520695
More than double the framerate in Jane Nash test :eek:

Yet of course there was another significant speed bump when upgrading the processor from there:
http://3dmark.com/compare/3dmv/1520695/3dmv/3461721

(don´t look at those clockrate rows in those compare urls too much, I guess some data was lost when they did the orb database upgrade and after that it just doesn´t recognize the correct clock sometimes...)

Even Crysis 2 is absolutely playable in pre-dx11 highest settings on a q6600. I did really enjoy the upgrade to 2600k though that made the game much smoother in dx11 mode (Just from upgrading the cpu I went from 20fps when looking out from the balcony near the beginning of the game to constantly over 30 fps.) but another upgrade to 580gtx was necessary there too to make it really enjoyable. So what I´m saying is, if you´re still running a Q6600 it is likely that it´s not just the cpu...a lot of the rest of your system is going to have to be upgraded too. Even with another 5870 in crossfire I was getting crappy low minimum fps so I had to sell them and go for 580 which fixed the problem - to my eyes - completely. Even though the numbers say it still dips below 20 occasionally, I don´t see and feel those dips while playing anymore whereas previously the performance would just drop to a halt occasionally.
 
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Yes a Q6600/Phenom II can play everything fine regardless of what Mr. Upgrade above demands us to believe. It's also pretty easy to become bottlenecked by GPU, even a unlocked 6950 or 560 Ti OC. Maybe I'll think about a Ivy Bridge upgrade if some game comes along that isn't playable (I think it's very unlikely really).

I'm curious if anyone has tried out Bulldozer with XP.
 
So... what do you think, would upgrading from Q6600 to Bulldozer make sense? Are those two cpus benchmarked anywhere?
 
Mendel said:
So... what do you think, would upgrading from Q6600 to Bulldozer make sense? Are those two cpus benchmarked anywhere?
Click to expand...

this test included the q6600
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/842-23/moyennes.html

obviously is quite weak, 2.4GHz can't help, is even clearly slower than a newer dual core (i3 2100, but on games the i3 2100 also beats any AMD CPU and even the qx9770 on their tests...)
but when overclocked it should look much better, look at the q9650, the q6600 at 3.3GHz should perform around that in most cases,

it makes a lot more sense to upgrade to a sandy bridge,
 
Mendel said:
So... what do you think, would upgrading from Q6600 to Bulldozer make sense? Are those two cpus benchmarked anywhere?
Click to expand...

I think you should OC the Q6600 to 3.2GHz and go with that. It will give you great performance in every game, despite what Captain Upgrade over there would have you believe.

Why is the i3 2100 such a beast when it comes to gaming?
 
homerdog said:
Why is the i3 2100 such a beast when it comes to gaming?
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well, sandy bridge single thread performance is amazing, look at cinebench single thread test, so you have 2 very strong cores with the great memory performance (super fast l3, imc), and hyper threading...
while HT is useless on the quad cores for gaming, on the core i3 it can bring good gains,


http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/...intel-core-i3-2100-2120/29/#abschnitt_f1_2010

http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?p=11398817#post11398817
 
homerdog said:
Why is the i3 2100 such a beast when it comes to gaming?
Click to expand...
Well it has that SB per core performance and many games are still not really utilizing more than 2 cores. Not that I'd suggest a gamer buy a dual core anymore. I imagine it would shame the 3.7 ghz oc Phenom II X2 that I have at work.
 
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