i7 3820 or Bulldozer fx 8150

[eastmen]

So I have the dozer already and I'm running it. A friend of mine went to the new haswell-e and gave me his old board and the 3820 for putting together his new stuff.

Is it worth moving to the 3820 or should I sell the parts ?

 

[mc6809e]

So I have the dozer already and I'm running it. A friend of mine went to the new haswell-e and gave me his old board and the 3820 for putting together his new stuff.

Is it worth moving to the 3820 or should I sell the parts ?

Personally I'd go with the i7, mainly because I run applications where single thread performance is important.

The other thing is cache handling. The i7-3820 has smart cache. One busy thread that needs lots of fast memory can potentially use all 10MB of it. The dozer arch is more limited.

 

[Rurouni]

Yes, you should move to the 3820. As much as I love AMD, if the choice between dozer and i7, I would go with i7.

 

[eastmen]

thanks , I can't really find much info on the 3820. Its a socket 2011 board and can take 8 sticks of ram.

maybe I will go from 16 to 32 gigs of ram. Gotta check out the price.

its a non K chip so I don't think it will over clock

 

[Rurouni]

And its memory is 4 channel.

 

[eastmen]

so do I need to run 4 sticks in it ?

 

[Rurouni]

If you want to take an advantage of it, then yes, 4 identical sticks.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

its a non K chip so I don't think it will over clock

It overclocks just fine It has locked multipliers to something like 43 and under if I remember correctly, That don't matter as you can adjust the internal base clock speed of the processor from the default 100Mhz to 125/166Mhz and use a lower multiplier to get basically any frequency your chip can manage. 2011-socket Sandy Bridges work differently in that regard compared to the 1155 models, where base clock can only be manipulated slightly.

 

[Albuquerque]

If you want to take an advantage of it, then yes, 4 identical sticks.

Exactly matching sticks for multi-channel memory configs have not been needed for an incredibly long time, since at least the 965 chipsets of yore. The most optimal is of course matching sticks, however multichannel ram configurations will still work with non-matching memory sticks populating all the available slots.

The 3820 got really good reviews as a potent quad core with very good overclocking abilities specifically linked to the 1.25x clock strap that was mentioned above. See also: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5276/intel-core-i7-3820-review-285-quadcore-sandy-bridge-e

 

[Rurouni]

You're right. It doesn't need to match, but the size at least need to match.
Edit: it supposedly can run in dual and triple channel too. Don't know if it support flex mode (where you can run different size, but only the lower size will run in multi channel).

 

[Albuquerque]

You're right. It doesn't need to match, but the size at least need to match.

As you later discovered, the size does not necessarily need to match. The performance is best with matched sizes, but is still "better" with even non-matched sizes. There are a number of older benchmarks showing the synthetic benchmark differences between dual channel, dual channel asynchronous (eg: Intel Flex) and single channel.

In nearly every case, very few consumer grade applications will notice the bandwidth difference.

 

[eastmen]

Thanks for all the info. Now I have to find where I put the intel bracket for my h100