Screw Bulldozer, upgraded to Sandy Bridge yesterday.

[Vdubchaos]

Microcenter had a glitch on their website, this motherboard was listed at $160 (http://www.microcenter.com/single_pr...uct_id=0364085) but when I added it to the cart it was $120 - $10 rebate....weird (btw, if you are looking check your local store website/stock...might work for you)

So Yonkers had 1 in stock yesterday and glitch was still working.....decided to just get it. 2500k was $180 bucks (which is not as good as $150 last week, but better than $220 elsewhere).

Got a nice 750W Antec PS fo4 $60 bucks as well (for my SLI set up, 460GTX OC x 2)

Knowing my luck, Bulldozer will blow away Intel in every gaming benchmark now.

Honestly though, it will give me an excuse to upgrade my 2nd /kids gaming rig.

Anyways, what a difference. For those that have been telling me how E8400 is outdated and my resistance....sorry, you were right.

BC2 and RO2 is SO much smoother now it's crazy. I guess you don't know until you try it.

My CPU was def bottle necking my GPU and some games. With my E8400, even with lower settings and 30+FPS my game felt choppy compare to SB. WOW

 

[Ika]

It's not a glitch, the Z68X-UD3H has a combo deal with the 2500k, taking $40 off the mobo.

That said, I have the same combo (except I got mine when the 2500k was $150 ) and it is so freakin' fast. I'm coming from an E6420 so any upgrade would have been nice, but this is fantastic.

 

[LOL_Wut_Axel]

If you're gaming you weren't gonna miss out on anything by going BD, anyway, since SB will be a lot faster for that.

You found some very good deals. :thumbsup:

 

[eternalone]

congratulations you have chosen wisely my son.

 

[Arkadrel]

So Yonkers had 1 in stock yesterday and glitch was still working...

Wow, you ordered and buildt the day after.
Thats some fast service or....

Why make the thread named "screw bulldozer" though?
Couldnt it have been, "Wow sandy bridge ate my E8400 for lunch" or some such?

Just so many negative "bulldozer" threads popping up its weird.
To many haters as is, anyways grats on faster pc

 

[Vdubchaos]

It's not a glitch, the Z68X-UD3H has a combo deal with the 2500k, taking $40 off the mobo.

That said, I have the same combo (except I got mine when the 2500k was $150 ) and it is so freakin' fast. I'm coming from an E6420 so any upgrade would have been nice, but this is fantastic.

Well, it wasn't in the MB/CPU combo deals. Unannounced deal perhaps?

Yeah I did miss the $150...but that's fine.

 

[Vdubchaos]

Wow, you ordered and buildt the day after.
Thats some fast service or....

Why make the thread named "screw bulldozer" though?
Couldnt it have been, "Wow sandy bridge ate my E8400 for lunch" or some such?

Just so many negative "bulldozer" threads popping up its weird.
To many haters as is, anyways grats on faster pc

I picked up everything at 4pm

It was running by 7pm

I didn't reformat my hard drive, just reinstalled all the chipset/MB drivers etc.

I will redo that it when SSD is in

 

[bryanW1995]

I think that thread title echoes the feelings of many of us FORMER amd fans. My only consolation is that hector was still at the helm while BD was being developed, so we can at least shower a bit of the blame on him as well.

I wonder if AMD might not have been better off just trying to build better cpus instead of buying a gpu company for $5 billion?

 

[Gigantopithecus]

I wonder if AMD might not have been better off just trying to build better cpus instead of buying a gpu company for $5 billion?

Considering that Zacate marked a major improvement over Atom and a substantial step forward in low power computing, and that Llano leveled the mobile playing field for the first time in five years, I think buying a $5B GPU company was a fine idea. ...But you're the expert, right?

 

[tweakboy]

Ya Sandy is def the best choice for gaming. My dad has same card as mine on his 2600K @ 3.8Ghz and gets 7.9 for graphics in WEI while I get 7.6

Soo the CPU alone lifted that number 3 digits....

 

[Ancalagon44]

Considering that Zacate marked a major improvement over Atom and a substantial step forward in low power computing, and that Llano leveled the mobile playing field for the first time in five years, I think buying a $5B GPU company was a fine idea. ...But you're the expert, right?

The CPU division still sucks though. Llano's CPU is still underwhelming. Bobcat is the only product that by some miracle is actually good.

BD appears to be months if not more than a year late, and underperforming compared to not only ancient Intel CPUs but also AMD's previous generation CPUs.

 

[Vdubchaos]

I wonder if AMD might not have been better off just trying to build better cpus instead of buying a gpu company for $5 billion?

Perhaps they knew they reached a dead end with CPU business?

:/

I was a big AMD fan, but now I'm just a fan of whoever gives me the best performance for the money (at the time of my purchase)

 

[bryanW1995]

Considering that Zacate marked a major improvement over Atom and a substantial step forward in low power computing, and that Llano leveled the mobile playing field for the first time in five years, I think buying a $5B GPU company was a fine idea. ...But you're the expert, right?

I've owned more amd computers (mobile and desktop) than intel, probably by a 2:1 margin. I'm just frustrated that amd's apparent strategy is to abandon the desktop segment. I don't give a crap about laptops/nettops/etc. Sure Zacate and Llano are great, but are they gonna make more money than a kicka$$ BD would have? You have to wonder if a company with limited resources like amd has the engineering talent/know-how to simultaneously work on several projects at once. And are they going to make more money in the long run focusing on these tiny profit margin items instead of bigger ticket desktop/professional cpus?

 

[bryanW1995]

The CPU division still sucks though. Llano's CPU is still underwhelming. Bobcat is the only product that by some miracle is actually good.

BD appears to be months if not more than a year late, and underperforming compared to not only ancient Intel CPUs but also AMD's previous generation CPUs.

I'm sure this is just a coincidence, and has nothing to do with the priority/resources that were put into each project.

 

[sangyup81]

Sure Zacate and Llano are great, but are they gonna make more money than a kicka$$ BD would have?

Yes

And are they going to make more money in the long run focusing on these tiny profit margin items instead of bigger ticket desktop/professional cpus?

Yes

 

[infoiltrator]

Please.. AMD has had production problems at Global Foundries.
There is no reason to expect miracles, there is no reason to expect junk, release date is the 12th.
Relax and read the reviews.

 

[bryanW1995]

Perhaps they knew they reached a dead end with CPU business?

:/

I was a big AMD fan, but now I'm just a fan of whoever gives me the best performance for the money (at the time of my purchase)

My big concern is that if intel has nobody pushing them, we've seen in the past what happens. Stagnation, ginourmous prices, and less-frequent upgrades for us. And lately they've started to artificially segment their product to make it more difficult to get as much "oomph" out of your overclocking dollar. This is not a pretty future to envision, but, sadly, it now appears inevitable.

 

[Genx87]

Considering that Zacate marked a major improvement over Atom and a substantial step forward in low power computing, and that Llano leveled the mobile playing field for the first time in five years, I think buying a $5B GPU company was a fine idea. ...But you're the expert, right?

That is a lot of money to pay for a low end product. You are right they bought a 5 billion dollar company. Their market cap is currently right around 4 billion. That return is going to take forever if it can ever be recouped.

Think of what AMD could had done with that money. Build chipsets and work with ATI\Nvidia to build a low power IGP that does the same thing and have a few billion left over.

 

[Genx87]

My big concern is that if intel has nobody pushing them, we've seen in the past what happens. Stagnation, ginourmous prices, and less-frequent upgrades for us. And lately they've started to artificially segment their product to make it more difficult to get as much "oomph" out of your overclocking dollar. This is not a pretty future to envision, but, sadly, it now appears inevitable.

Intel will still have the motivation to provide upgrade paths. If they dont, they will die as people stop upgrading because the 2500K is what people can buy for 200ish bucks for a decade.

AMD hasnt been competitive in any meaningful way since 2006. Yet we have had 1st and 2nd generation i series chips.

 

[Vdubchaos]

My big concern is that if intel has nobody pushing them, we've seen in the past what happens. Stagnation, ginourmous prices, and less-frequent upgrades for us. And lately they've started to artificially segment their product to make it more difficult to get as much "oomph" out of your overclocking dollar. This is not a pretty future to envision, but, sadly, it now appears inevitable.

I agree. don't get me wrong, by all means I would love to see AMD do well and compete with Intel.

 

[podspi]

Wow, you ordered and buildt the day after.
Thats some fast service or....

Why make the thread named "screw bulldozer" though?
Couldnt it have been, "Wow sandy bridge ate my E8400 for lunch" or some such?

Just so many negative "bulldozer" threads popping up its weird.
To many haters as is, anyways grats on faster pc

Microcenter is a B&M. So depending on how quickly you can drive there and back, service can be quite quick If you don't know about MC, I'd check to see if there is one in your area, because they and Fry's have some of the best prices in the industry, including Newegg, TD, etc.

I think that thread title echoes the feelings of many of us FORMER amd fans. My only consolation is that hector was still at the helm while BD was being developed, so we can at least shower a bit of the blame on him as well.

I wonder if AMD might not have been better off just trying to build better cpus instead of buying a gpu company for $5 billion?

Let's confirm BD sucks before we start the analysis of what went wrong. It doesn't make sense to me that they would have delayed so long to release something that is comparable to the X6.

 

[sangyup81]

Let's confirm BD sucks before we start the analysis of what went wrong. It doesn't make sense to me that they would have delayed so long to release something that is comparable to the X6.

Yeah, it's also not enough for me to hear that BD sucks. I want to know what went wrong and whether this is a total failure of design or a failure of implementation like the original Phenom was. The Phenom II ended up being a great chip for AMD (not comparing them to Intel)

THIS is why I'm waiting for the Anandtech review

 

[Gikaseixas]

I wonder if AMD might not have been better off just trying to build better cpus instead of buying a gpu company for $5 billion?

This. That money could be spent on improving their designs, implementation and on further market research. My i7 860 @ 4.0ghz will embrass BD anyday, it's a sad state of affairs

 

[Arkaign]

Let's confirm BD sucks before we start the analysis of what went wrong. It doesn't make sense to me that they would have delayed so long to release something that is comparable to the X6.

I agree with the waiting for final benches (and even give AMD a chance to put some SW band-aids on it if it's really bad for reasons that can be fixed at least a little) before condemning BD to the trash-bin of tech history.

That said, it's not without precedent for major CPU releases to come out after a lengthy development process and to be a big mess. This is because it takes many years from start to finish to design a truly different type of CPU vs. a more minor die shrink or bit of tweaking here and there (eg; add a feature set, add L3 cache, add SSE4, that kind of thing).

BD is a radical departure in many ways from conventional x86 processor designs, and it's beginning to appear as if there are some fundamental problems with implementing the design under real-world use.

Think of some other designs that came out with a whimper instead of a bang :

Intel Pentium 4 Willamette, it mandated hugely expensive RDRAM memory, wasn't particularly fast at anything, and even got outran by P3s in certain situations. Certainly clock for clock it was awful. Luckily Northwood changed all of that, and the evolution remained competitive until Prescott.

AMD K5. They had a ludicrously hard time ramping up the clockspeed, and they resorting to using totally bogus PR numbers to make it sound competitive in marketing, but the thing just didn't perform well enough to fool people with that.

Pentium D. Came out on 90nm tech, Smithfield. It actually became a decent bargain chip (I bought an 805 and ran it well over 3ghz with a decent air cooler), but it was hot, power hungry, and utterly uncompetitive with anything but the very lowest X2-3800, which was a clearly superior product. It's no coincidence that this was the era that saw $1000+ X2s.

AMD Quadfather / Dual FX. Nuff said. Aside from humor, there was zero reason to buy this, and a million reasons NOT to.

etc.

Those are the most spectacular failures that come to mind in recent memory.

 

[996GT2]

This is what I did 10 months ago (almost to the day). Grabbed a 2500K for $179.99 from MC on the day that SB came out in January. Haven't looked back since