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I had a board DESTROYED by VRM heat issues with an FX8150
In early 2012 I had one of these boards die and take out the FX8150 on it. It was obvious what had happened, one of the voltage regulator IC's was blown apart! I suspect due to that heatsink being held on only with two spring pins and thermal tape, then being bumped out of position during a teardown(my machines are often apart for changes). It was overclocked to 4.6 GHZ, could be stable at 4.7 but made too much heat even for the FriOCK 6 heatpipe cooler to control when full throttled. Bottom of the "voltage wall" was 4.5 GHZ with much less heat.
I got the same board again and an FX8120 (then a lot cheaper), decided to limit overclocks to the bottom of the "voltage wall" to control heat-and to always push the VFM heatsink down on the board after any removal of the motherboard or the cooler exhaust shroud I use to force all hot air directly ot of the case. This one usually won't go over 4.4 GHZ unless I push the hell out of the voltage AND the fans as stability becomes very temperature dependent, this is as expected on a lower-binned chip. When I got it it could run 4.5 GHZ without going over 1.39V, but after some usage it needs to stay at 4.4 to hold a 100% load on all 8 cores. Staying at the bottom of the voltage wall would have not allowed more than 4.5GHZ on the 8150 I previously had either, so no great loss: another 100 mhz would not have been worth another $50. At maximum stable overclocks there would be a 200 mhz difference, still not a lot.
BTW, during the half of the year the house is heated Bulldozer can heat your room, this gives a nice warm spot in winter that could allow turning down the furnace. On the other hand, rendering a long video in summer requires letting the whole room get hot if you don't want to add A/C power wastage to Bulldozer's appetite at full throttle. A small room can be heated by anything bigger than a laptop, for summer use I should go with water cooling plumbed to a radiator outside the house At idle the power use is supposed to be only half of what a Phenom II X4 idles at, but I still notice the heat in the warm season. I got rid of 300W worth of incandescent bulbs for about 30W worth of LEDs, so the whole room should use less power other than when rendering video, a job never exceeding 20 minutes or so. Still feels like more heat with the computer than the bulbs though.
Originally posted by ParticleBoard
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I got the same board again and an FX8120 (then a lot cheaper), decided to limit overclocks to the bottom of the "voltage wall" to control heat-and to always push the VFM heatsink down on the board after any removal of the motherboard or the cooler exhaust shroud I use to force all hot air directly ot of the case. This one usually won't go over 4.4 GHZ unless I push the hell out of the voltage AND the fans as stability becomes very temperature dependent, this is as expected on a lower-binned chip. When I got it it could run 4.5 GHZ without going over 1.39V, but after some usage it needs to stay at 4.4 to hold a 100% load on all 8 cores. Staying at the bottom of the voltage wall would have not allowed more than 4.5GHZ on the 8150 I previously had either, so no great loss: another 100 mhz would not have been worth another $50. At maximum stable overclocks there would be a 200 mhz difference, still not a lot.
BTW, during the half of the year the house is heated Bulldozer can heat your room, this gives a nice warm spot in winter that could allow turning down the furnace. On the other hand, rendering a long video in summer requires letting the whole room get hot if you don't want to add A/C power wastage to Bulldozer's appetite at full throttle. A small room can be heated by anything bigger than a laptop, for summer use I should go with water cooling plumbed to a radiator outside the house At idle the power use is supposed to be only half of what a Phenom II X4 idles at, but I still notice the heat in the warm season. I got rid of 300W worth of incandescent bulbs for about 30W worth of LEDs, so the whole room should use less power other than when rendering video, a job never exceeding 20 minutes or so. Still feels like more heat with the computer than the bulbs though.
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