Quote from E.Reiljans :

It's kind of fascinating you say that, because so did you.

N-E-way........

Quote from MadCatX :

See? That's why I never ask for an advice on the Interwebs, I don't feel like turning my problems into a flamewar fuel.

If you're not already up to speed with the Llano architecture and you don't feel like googling it up, Bulldozer:
- Is a real 8-core CPU
- Has 4 modules with 2 cores per each
- Each module has a shared L2 cache and FPU. The shared FPU becomes a bit of a bottleneck only when both cores want to execute a 256 bit long SIMD instruction at once (today only AVX is like that)
- It scales much better than Intel's HT, with about 80% effectivity of what a full-blown 8-core CPU would do.
- It works best when accompanied by a Bulldozer-aware CPU scheduler. It doesn't really help the performance, but it helps to lower the power consumption a lot. Windows 8 seems to have such a CPU scheduler.

Bottomline: If you're looking to save as much money as possible and you don't build your life around dominating 3DMark leaderboards, Bulldozer it not as bad a choice as some "experts" here would like you to believe. It has quite poor instruction-per-cycle ratio though, so some unoptimized single thread apps won't run as well as they do on SNB's or even older Phenoms.

Quote from MadCatX :

Bottomline: If you're looking to save as much money as possible

wth are you talking about? the 2500k completely dominates the 8150 in just about every game there is while costing exactly the same and so will the 3570 once it price has stabilized
http://www.anandtech.com/show/ ... ge-core-i7-3770k-review/7

btw speaking of ssds the crucial m4s have just gone down in price quite considerably making them really really interesting

Quote from Shotglass :

btw speaking of ssds the crucial m4s have just gone down in price quite considerably making them really really interesting

I think it's about 68p per GB in the uk now. not bad at all.
http://www.dabs.com/products/o ... ate-drive-7X6C.html?src=2

Even ancient AMD Phenoms beat Bulldozers in gaming use. Mid-spec Intels annihilate it.
http://plaza.fi/s/f/editor/images/X-20111012090443367143.png

So, bulldozer performance isn't good, that means it must be power efficient atleast? Nope.
http://plaza.fi/s/f/editor/images/X-201110120907238611.png

It's a horrible architecture. Cheap, but horrible.

Quote from Matrixi :

Even ancient AMD Phenoms beat Bulldozers in gaming use. Mid-spec Intels annihilate it.
http://plaza.fi/s/f/editor/images/X-20111012090443367143.png

So, bulldozer performance isn't good, that means it must be power efficient atleast? Nope.
http://plaza.fi/s/f/editor/images/X-201110120907238611.png

It's a horrible architecture. Cheap, but horrible.

looking at those pics, the question thisnameistaken should be asking is "do I play Star Craft?"
in some scenarios, a skoda will out perform a ferrari (ice racing). that doesn't mean the ferrari is shit does it?

not all reviews can be taken as gospel though,theres always going to be reviews that claim one thing while another claims different

Quote from Shotglass :

wth are you talking about? the 2500k completely dominates the 8150 in just about every game there is while costing exactly the same and so will the 3570 once it price has stabilized
http://www.anandtech.com/show/ ... ge-core-i7-3770k-review/7

Don't worry, I saw some benchmarks. The price depends on the region, I could definitely save a few bucks by getting a Bulldozer system here(the MoBo's for Bulldozers come cheaper too, at least here). I admit wouldn't be much, but in the end you still need a high-end GPU to be able to tell the difference between i5-2500 and FX-8150 in most games, who cares if a game runs at avg 180 or 120 FPS?

Quote from dadge :

looking at those pics, the question thisnameistaken should be asking is "do I play Star Craft?"
in some scenarios, a skoda will out perform a ferrari (ice racing). that doesn't mean the ferrari is shit does it?

Plenty more gaming benchmarks in the link shotglass shared where bulldozer takes a similar beating.

I don't like averages when looking at stats. we need the lowest fps. that's when the card/processor struggles and that's where it all counts.

Quote from Matrixi :

So, bulldozer performance isn't good, that means it must be power efficient atleast? Nope.
http://plaza.fi/s/f/editor/images/X-201110120907238611.png

It's a horrible architecture. Cheap, but horrible.

I'm not going to honor this flamewar any further, but unless that power benchmark was run at 4 threads only, it's completely meaningless. 8-core CPU will always use more power than a 4-core one under full load. Also the idle power consumption get better when you use an OS with Bulldozer-aware CPU scheduler which lets the whole module "park".

on the web there will be plenty of benchmark results stating that ones as good as the other and vice versa.