AMD FX-4100 Pro Reviews

It turns out that the only one who may benefit from the upcoming migration from Phenom II to the new FX family is AMD. Bulldozer microarchitecture allows the company to stop using old manufacturing process for their semiconductor dies and move on to the new cores with lower production cost. However, the end users won’t win in this situation. FX CPUs that are coming to replace the good old Phenom II processors are not faster or cheaper than their predecessors. Therefore, until processors on new Piledriver microarchitecture come out, the new FX are of no real interest to AMD fans and Phenom II owners. FX CPUs are also hardly appealing for the new systems: Intel’s Core i5 and Core i3 processors can offer better combination of price and performance in a wide range of tasks with only a few exceptions such as video transcoding in x264 codec and selected 3D rendering applications. So, we can’t recommend getting involved with the new FX CPUs from AMD at least until they revise their pricing. And even though there are claims that desktop Bulldozer processors are selling pretty well, we can’t imagine who could really be investing their hard-earned cash into these products.

The AMD FX-4100 is currently carrying a retail price of about $130 USD while the Intel Core i3 2120 is coming in right now at $140 USD. In most of the Linux tests that were carried out, this lower-end Sandy Bridge CPU blew AMD's FX-4100 out of the water. The i3-2120 operates at just 3.3GHz and is a dual-core part with Hyper Threading while the FX-4100 operates at 3.6/3.8GHz and is a true quad-core.

The best that can be said about this dual-module Bulldozer, then, is that it's not far behind its triple and quad-module brethren in games.

The AMD FX-4100 didn't top the charts when it comes to CPU performance, but the low price and solid overclocking results make it a decent chip for those looking for a budget system build.