The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Your right Sam there have been rumblings of water cooled cpu's but they will be expensive. I personally would buy them with the stock heatsinks and just get my own cheaper version of H2O cooling. Besides I like to have the extra heatsink assemblies for fixing peoples PC's I work on, or as a emergency backup for my own, my own personal preference.

 

Thing is though, what sort of stock heatsink is it going to have to be to take 220W TDP?

 

Basically the most asinine and useless chips ever made. Not to mention that no motherboard actually exists that supports a TDP that high. Also, having to ship any sort of liquid loop with a stock CPU is a joke. Basically completely impractical for anyone and everyone.

AMD is literally playing the clockspeed game like Intel did with NetBurst not so long ago. Their architecture is bad, bloated and power hungry. It has almost zero redeeming qualities, and simply hasn't gotten any better at all since the release of Bulldozer. No, Piledriver is not really an improvement, more like a half-hearted wet fart.

Problem here is, most of AMD's flagship chips are depending on the aftermarket to sell. I can't see that one selling worth a damn when you can buy a much cheaper chip and do the same thing effortlessly. Too bad one of those at stock takes as much power as my OC'd Phenom II, which isn't a particularly efficient chip to begin with...

 

To be fair, you could say that about the last three Intel generational increases
Admittedly, they build on something that was much more capable to start with, but lack of innovation leads to lack of innovation, sadly.

That said, Intel are at least making movements on the power usage front. Even disregarding this behemoth, the stock Piledriver CPUs are still 125W I believe? Compare this to Haswell which, minor upgrade or not, contains the CPU itself, memory controller, PCI express controller, graphics processor, and now even the VRMs inside a 65W envelope, excluding the highest-level 4770K CPU. Strip all this away and the actual load of the CPU has probably got to be in the 40s.

 

10% of nothing vs 10% of something... do the math, lol. Also consider Intel has had several generational improvements while AMD barely managed to crap out Piledriver in the same timeframe.

Also agreed that the power consumption situation is absolutely retarded and was entirely a step in the wrong direction. AMD should have scrapped Bulldozer and focused on improving the decent chip they already had. As I see it, any BD/PD chip is a waste of money and time. You are actually better served and getting a better deal if you hunt down an EOL Phenom II X6. Also, Bobcat is an underperforming pile of crap. Good efficiency means nothing with mediocre performance that compares more closely to Athlon 64s than anything else.

That fact that Intel's CPU are just that much better makes me mildly depressed sometimes. The gap is epic.

 

I had a bit of a thought on this the other day. Suppose we treat the 8-core Piledriver CPUs for what they really are at the lowest level - a bifurcated 4-core CPU that offers double the performance-per-core that Piledriver does now.
What effectively would we have for this? It'd basically be a CPU that offers roughly the same performance per core as Ivy Bridge, so not far behind Haswell, for a little less cost, at the expense of higher power consumption (Truth be told, the only CPU in the Ivy Bridge series Piledriver can't best at anything is the full-on 3770K, which is a fair bit pricier than the FX-8350).

Can you imagine how different things would be if we could use the processing units inside Piledriver as singular CPU cores, rather than pairs? It's such a shame - there must be a technical reason for it, as otherwise even if AMD did learn about the flaw in the 8-core plan with Bulldozer, they could have fixed it with Piledriver if the fix was easy.

 

In other words, if we treat them as quad cores(which they technically are), their performance is actually quite decent. Nice bit of thinking there. The increasing proliferation of multi-core technology means they still put up decent numbers.

Still doesn't get anywhere near justifying their terrifying TDP though. I would never bother to OC one for fear of damaging other components. That fear is not unfounded either. They seem to be very problematic for certain motherboards, and they do take a disproportionately beefy cooler to even use at stock.

Not to mention most games still only support dual or quad at best. BD/PD is a moot point for every task except heavy, multi-core centric workloads. I understand gaming certainly isn't the industry benchmark for everything but it's a pretty clear indicator of how other software will be treating it.

I would be more apt to use my money for a better motherboard and try to squeeze a better OC out of this X6. I would gain more performance, and it wouldn't mean a massive increase in heat and power usage for a chip that's potentially slower in most things I'll use it for anyway.

 

The 400W draw identified by one of the reviewers of the original FX-8150 was certainly eyebrow-raising, but the fact of the matter is, if the levels of performance were close (never mind equal), I don't think Piledrivers having double the TDP of i-series CPUs would really bother that many people. Heat, noise and power consumption aren't big issues for everybody. They are for many enthusiasts like us (and one can potentially argue that AMD was once the enthusiast's brand) but to the average buyer going with the cheaper (and therefore, perceived better value) solution, the extra power needed probably isn't going to cause any issues.

That said, the 54% overclock I've had on my i5 750 since the day I bought it puts it exactly in line with an i5 3570, which in turn, is broadly similar to an FX-8320 in some things, an FX-8350 in others. It uses 200W to do it, but it gets the job done, and it's 3 1/2 years old. Further, it cost me £150. An FX-8350 to buy today costs £150. Really then, all that's been achieved in a sense with the 3 1/2 year development gap with AMD is to get 200W down to 130 ish.
Conversely, sitting beside the 750 is an i5 3470, at stock - and with that laughably small stock cooler, runs perfectly well at an almost silent noise level, with 95%+ of the performance of the 750. It'd fit in a mini-ITX system like that with no trouble at all, and still be very quiet. It too was £140. That seems a bit more like it.

 

Well, exactly how much better is the power consumption on PileDriver vs Bulldozer?

It certainly is a valid and widespread concern when high-end motherboards can barely handle some of the chips at stock. I would definitely plan to overclock. That would require a massive cooler and a very high end motherboard, no?

Their performance is just terrible anyway. Absolutely appalling. They're significantly slower in most tasks while having horrific power consumption. My Phenom II is straight up faster. I'm really trying, but I just can't see it as having any redeeming qualities.

 

Much better when overclocked actually, otherwise the 220W TDP on these chips wouldn't have been remotely feasible:

Assumed base idle wattage of 8W:

X6-1100T 3300/4200: 28W stock idle, 67W OC idle
FX-8150 3600/4818: 22W stock idle, 36W OC idle
FX-8350 4000/4800: 8W stock idle, 66W OC idle
i7-920 2666/4040: 64W stock idle, 122W OC idle
i5-3570K 3400/5000: 10W stock idle, 30W OC idle
i7-3770K 3500/4800: 11W stock idle, 26W OC idle
i7-3930K 3200/4700: 41W stock idle, 102W OC idle

X6-1100T 3300/4200: 135W stock load, 271W OC load
FX-8150 3600/4818: 142W stock load, 444W OC load
FX-8350 4000/4800: 114W stock load, 250W OC load
i7-920 2666/4040: 141W stock load, 292W OC load
i5-3570K 3400/5000: 67W stock load, 163W OC load
i7-3770K 3500/4800: 72W stock load, 142W OC load
i7-3930K 3200/4700: 149W stock load, 395W OC load

As you see, the 6-core Ivy Bridge CPUs aren't exactly the model of power efficiency when compared to their 4-core equivalents, but very little is. On the whole, the FX-8350's results are quite respectable here, as a product. They only pale when looking at the actual performance achieved by these settings.

 

Actually that does look quite decent. But I think this little comparison sums it up pretty well performance-wise. On average the Phenom II is some 20% faster than an equally clocked Bulldozer. Extrapolate for PileDriver.

http://wccftech.com/amd-bulldozer-f...i-x6-1100t-clocktoclock-benchmark-comparison/

Interesting to see that it actually maintains lower overall power usage than my X6. Too bad it's slower...

 

Yeah, quite amuses me to see how many people are calling those results fake, despite the fact that we now know them to be genuine, looking back.

As we knew, Bulldozer and Phenom II X6 are basically identical in fully multi-threaded environments at the same clock speed, as 8 Bulldozer cores give you the speed of 6 Phenom II cores. Piledriver has gone some, but not all of the way to redressing the balance. Ultimately it is some improvement, since you couldn't buy a 4Ghz Phenom II off the shelf, let alone the 4.7Ghz proposed, and there is the per-clock performance that Piledriver brough, slight though it is. Still though, while 8 Bulldozer cores got you 6 Phenom II cores, 8 Piledriver cores get you 4 Sandy Bridge cores at an equivalent clock speed, and that architecture's now 2 1/2 years old.

 

So if I were buying new, a PileDriver may be worth looking at. But considering I have a Phenom II... I might as well just get a better board and OC it some more.

A shame that Intel's CPUs are so ridiculously expensive.

 

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that they're not ridiculously expensive. They're a bit more expensive on a performance-per-currency standpoint, there's no denying that, but given the fact that in 1999 it was de rigeur to pay £500 for Pentium 3s, and in 2006 it was de rigeur to pay £250 for Athlon64 X2s when they came out (that was the 4200+ price in June 2006 when I bought mine), it's £260 for the full-fat Haswell 4770K, and £190 for the intermediate 4570K. 'Ridiculously expensive'? Not really. The only CPUs where I think that exclamation is warranted is extreme edition CPUs, and remember, it's not just Intel that have done that - think back to when the FX moniker was first used - FX-53? FX-55? FX-60? All of them were £600 plus. When companies have the technological advantage, as AMD did then, they charge extra for 'the best of the best of the best' - and the GTX Titan is another example of that in the graphics sector.

By all means call the extreme edition CPUs overpriced, but for what you're getting, I think 'a little expensive' is as far as is warranted for Intel's mainstream products.

 

Also, for low-end stuff, how about:

credit:xbitlabs
It's well known that x264 is an area where AMD do well, and an important area for many of us who transcode video.

The $70 A6-5400K is here bested by the $60 Celeron G1620, so it's not as if to get a decent Intel CPU you have to buy one of the expensive ones. Moving further up, the A8-5500 does handily beat the G2120, but it costs 30% more, at $105 versus $80. The Intel sitting beside it, the i3 3225, is $130 - A little more expensive admittedly, but again, this benchmark is familiar AMD territory so it's perhaps unsurprising. Considering the i3s are faster than not just the 5500 but even the best A10-5800K in every other benchmark in the application test suite (Winrar, chrome, RoboHornet, Nero AAC, Photoshop, Cinebench and 3DMark), that $25 surcharge seems worth it to me...

 

SUrely they're not charging a thousand dollars!!! They gotta know that it's performance is not worth that much...
http://www.tweaktown.com/news/31127...-info-spotted-seems-a-bit-too-high/index.html

 

They might, but you have to remember, AMD haven't officially disclosed the pricing, so that's basically just conjecture at the moment.

 

True. It also sounds, like this MAY be a limited release, and preorder price.

 

It's only supposed to be going to system integrators at first.

 

Well, maybe this freakishly high TDP and overclocking trend, will allow for ANOTHER trend Meaning, motherboard manufacturers should really step up their game, and build freakishly beastly motherboards! That would certainly be my dream come true But I think society as a whole, would prefer exactly what intel has been accomplishing. Super fast CPU's, at low wattage requirements. Myself, I could care less about power requirements. Provided my total desktop environment, doesn't exceed 2000W. But I really don't see that happening. Probably not even with Quad-SLI.

Here's a hopeful thought. Perhaps AMD is putting so much of their funds into a secret project, overclocking an old architecture is the best they can come up with quickly. If they sell enough at the rumored pricing, it'd certainly help them with funding. Perhaps they're working on a smaller architecture.