KVR Audio

Debutante · Post by **Debutante** » Fri Nov 11, 2011 2:37 am

I'm reading terribly mixed reviews about this new processor. I'm an AMD man for reasons I can't explain. I want to upgrade, but I have to buy a new MOBO too. It's only $300 so what's the deal...?

VitaminD · Post by **VitaminD** » Fri Nov 11, 2011 3:21 am

I'm an AMD fan too... not a 'fanboy' that is, but definitely a long time fan... and based on the numerous reviews and charts I've seen, I'm avoiding the bulldozer/zambezi line for now.

Actually I'm looking at an i5-2500 cpu.. although, honestly, I may hold out until Ivy Bridge is released or AMD gets their act together.

The per core performance on the current Bulldozer series is entirely pathetic. The older Phenom II is better in this regard. Unless you have specialized software that can make use of the multiple cores, it is really not worth it.

Dominus · Post by **Dominus** » Fri Nov 11, 2011 4:22 am

AMD has been lacking for years. I don't even offer them in my builds anymore, and I used to run AMDs in my own personal systems.

Uncle E · Post by **Uncle E** » Fri Nov 11, 2011 4:35 am

Thanks for the shout out! 15% discount for you!

mandolarian · Post by **mandolarian** » Fri Nov 11, 2011 5:26 am

Really? A shout OUT? Really, Uncle E? Didn't even use CAPS.

Bulldozer is best looked at from a safe distance, in a server room across town. Trinity might be worth getting closer to if GloFlo can improve their processes...but if you want a decent cheap AMD CPU right now, that'd be the hexcore 1090T. Overclocks well and it's cheap. Nice board, CPU and 8G RAM under $300 if you shop around. For example: 1090T Combo at NCIX

Debutante · Post by **Debutante** » Mon Nov 14, 2011 10:03 pm

Thanks for the replies - I'll wait... and yes; jrrshop is my preferred authority on DAW PCs, and this thread was deliberately aimed for their reply.

Kaine · Post by **Kaine** » Tue Nov 15, 2011 4:28 pm

I've just finished benching after a few days playing about with various AMD boards. I've already posted a ramble over at SOS so I'll copy pasta myself here for you guys.

Well as I'm still sat on my arse waiting for my SB EX boards to show up I thought I'd do something mildly constructive and sort out a Bulldozer spec.

My inital aim was to run a AMD cpu at 4.5GHZ as that's going to be my target for the Sandy Extremes next week. I'm using the FX8120 for benching for a number of reasons, the main one being that it seems to be the same chip as the FX8150 with a lower clock at stock. So I thought bang per buck wise if I'm going to run these things at 4.5GHZ we'll save £50 on the price and ramp up the cheaper chip would offer more value.

So started with a Gigabyte board which set up fine but hung everytime I put Cubase underload.
Moved onto an Asus that I'm still cursing about. Absolutely maddness trying to overclock it, with the normal tweaks causing it to do nothing but hang on every other reboot.

So MSI 970A C45. Plugged it in whacked in the settings and got into windows.... froze in testing, so rebooted ramped up the NB/SB voltages and voila a working bench. I could probably refine it for heat gains but as a rough and ready bench it'll do.

So open up Cubase with a DAWBench template and crack on :

64 - 98
128 -104
256 -144
512 -144

I retested each latency 3 times total with a reboot between each. The last two scores look well wrong unless the's some crazy bottleneck somewhere.

So I thought I'd de-clock it back to stock in case it was... you know... me being a numpty.

64 -54
128 -86
256 -96
512 -97

Apparently not then.

If anyone can explain those 256/512 scores I'm all ears.

However that aside I'm shocked. I honestly thought these would be the in the ballpark as the i7 950's and they are not remotely even close.

(I've not re-edited the graph yet, I'll do that when the SBEX scores come in, it's just there for reference along with the scores above)

In fact it's even beaten at stock by the older Hexcore Phanom 1090T chip from the last generation refresh, which whilst I'd seen it mentioned it would happen in some benchmarks in some other published test sessions, I'm still quite shocked to see it here.

So all in all? Poor value for money for audio. At stock it's no better than a Q6600 system for considerably more cash and overclocked it's still outperformed by a OC'd 2600k by about 250% for only a few hundred quid more.

TL;DR : It sucks more than even I suspected.
TL;DR for TL;DR : Meh.

I'm not JJRshop but it's something

P.s Yes the graph is hard to read in the quote. Direct link is : http://www.scanproaudio.info/wp-content ... -chart.jpg

jcschild · Post by **jcschild** » Tue Nov 15, 2011 9:27 pm

Lol Pete! well i aint uncle e either but also a repost as well from another forum..

well its that time.
we have been playing with both the new AMDs and the new Intel Sandy E.
sandy e will have to wait as we cant get the engineering sample motherboard to behave DPC wise. (waiting on a new bios) on video it did about 11% better than a 2600 but thats all i have for now.

using Dawbench DSP RXC test. the numbers for the AMD FX 6100 6 core 3.33GHz are rather dismal. it cant even complete with the older 1090T.

990FX chipset AMD3+ board. latest drivers etc
we tried numerous tricks and tweaks (other than OCing) to no avail

Cubase 6 latest updates/RME Multiface latest drivers stock speeds

256 buffer
new AMD FX 6100 95 RXC
older AMD 1090T 144 RXC
Intel 2600 212 RXC

32 Buffer (i didn't waste my time testing the rest)

new AMD FX 6100 72 RXC
older AMD 1090T 80 RXC
Intel 2600 183 RXC

got to say this is the first time i have seen a new processor be slower than an old one.

Scott
ADK

Kaine · Post by **Kaine** » Wed Nov 16, 2011 12:43 pm

Cheers Scott, that confirms for me at least that I wasn't doing something crazy in testing as those result line up with my own...

I had been wondering but after a couple of chip & board changes it did look to be the correct result. Has to be said your not the only one shocked at a new cpu under performing the old one.

VitaminD · Post by **VitaminD** » Thu Nov 17, 2011 6:20 pm

AMD rolled the dice, expecting multi core to matter more than individual core performance. They lost that roll.

That really is a shame.. I wonder what the prices will be for the next wave of Intel chips in light of this knowledge...

q_h · Post by **q_h** » Tue Nov 22, 2011 9:23 am

To build reaxcomp-standalone was used Intel compiler with this "optimization" for non-Intel CPUs:

(left- dawbench RCX CPU instructions log, right -real project)
http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49
And how does it affect performance? -
multiband compressor AMD CPU load:

All AMD CPU DAWBench results useless and biased .

Kaine · Post by **Kaine** » Tue Nov 22, 2011 11:06 am

q_h wrote:To build reaxcomp-standalone was used Intel compiler with this "optimization" for non-Intel CPUs:

(left- dawbench RCX CPU instructions log, right -real project)
http://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49
And how does it affect performance? -
multiband compressor AMD CPU load:

All AMD CPU DAWBench results useless and biased .

Even if that was the case the only way it could be even remotely deemed value for money would be if we saw a 100% performance increase in switching to another set of plug in's to run the test.

q_h · Post by **q_h** » Tue Nov 22, 2011 6:56 pm

MultiDynamics 5

jcschild · Post by **jcschild** » Tue Nov 22, 2011 7:28 pm

funny my video benchmarks reveal the same dog slow AMD processors
and i dont use any synthetic tests

SSE2 is in both processors anyway.. so your point was what?

curvin · Post by **curvin** » Wed Nov 23, 2011 4:41 am

Being the developer of the DAWbench Suite I am watching this with great interest. The DAWbench DSP suite is comprised of 4 x 3rd party reference plugins ( as well as the bundled Multiband in Cubendo prior to Cubase 6.02 ). There is also the DAWbench VI using Native Instruments Kontakt 4.

If the results are consistent across a wider range of Plugins and Virtual Instruments, then the issue has far greater reach.

Lets me just say that the Benchmark Universal Suite was not developed at a time where the Intel v AMD Wars were active, it was developed well after Core2 had pretty much neutered any argument in that area , so there was no bias intended against AMD, if that is what is being implied. Even if I wanted to, I didn't have the tools or the knowledge to even contemplate trying to favour one architecture over another, I simply use commercially available DAW Hosts and plugins. How the developers compile and optimise their code is the real issue at hand here, and if they choose to use the Intel compiler for what ever reason , that is going to be the yardstick that we will inevitably use to measure how the respective architectures perform in our dedicated audio application.

I'll reserve further comment until I see a wider range of results.

In the meantime, q_h can maybe offer up some examples of DAW hosts and plugins where the developers have not used the suspect compiler and "crippled code".

Peace

V.C

AMD Bulldozer X8 FX-8150? (where's jrrshop at)