Specification and Performance
Specification and Performance
The Fusion Bulldozer comes with one of AMD’s flagship processors, the 8 cored FX 8150. Chillblast has used its overclocking expertise to max this chip out to a clock speed of 4.6GHz; an impressive boost of 1GHz. This produces a fair amount of extra heat of course, which is ably managed by a rather lovely looking BeQuiet CPU cooler. The orientation of the mounting method in the cooler means it sucks air from just above the video card, but this didn’t seem to hamper cooling as temperatures stayed on the right side of acceptable even when running synthetic stress testing applications like Prime 95. The extremely large 200mm cooling fans in the Corsair case also kept the Radeons cool, despite there being two of them installed.
The Radeon 6990 may be the world’s fastest video card, but a Pair of Radeon 6970s is even faster. True to form the machine managed an incredible showing in the latest games. To really stress the machine each game was set to the maximum possible in-engine settings, and tested on a 30” Dell U3011 monitor at 2560 x 1600 resolution. 30 frames per second is generally the accepted frame rate needed for smooth gameplay. In each case the Bulldozer Crossfire smashed this target, in some case by more than 100fps.
In a nutshell, there aren’t any PC games on the market right now that the Bulldozer doesn’t easily cope with, even at this extreme level of detail and ultra-high resolution. If you are running at the more normal full-HD resolution (1920 x 1080) you should be achieving over 100fps in each of these tests.
General performance is also superb with this PC, with the FX 8150 at 4.6GHz powering through our video editing and Cinebench DCC benchmarks quicker than we have seen before. Only a heavily overclocked Core i7 chip would be faster in these benchmarks, but having 8 threads at your disposal does improve multi-tasking. Subjectively the system feels like bottled lightning.
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