AMD FX-Series FX-8120 Black Edition Eight Core Processor (3.10 GHz, 16MB Cache, Socket AM3+, 125W, 3 Year Warranty, Retail Boxed)

Bought this to replace my athlon x3 cpu. and wow what a difference..Combined with my 16gb ram and gtx550ti it helped finish of an amazing gaming machine. Handles the hardest tasks with ease, including 3d rendering. Love it.

Got this a few weeks ago and has handled everything i've gave it with no slow down- i've built this with a as rock extreme3 motherboard, 16gb ram and a hd 6870. not seen any slow down in any games i've gave it either. Don't understand some of the negatave reviews i've seen for this, why spend more when this does everything you could want

If you love looking at synthetic benchmarks and spend a lot of time debating the difference between 73 and 77 fps in a game, or 5 seconds difference in a 2 hour rendering, and have more money to spend, you are probably better off with an intel something. This cpu is not "THE" speed demon. Is plenty fast to do everything you need to do with a pc nowadays, heavy gaming, rendering, browsing, compiling, zipping, whatever... in some cases (optimized sw) it can top intel's more expensive stuff (again, by the all important split second margin.), and relative performance will probably increase over time, as sw becomes more parallel, but I digress. The whole FX platform is cheaper than the intel "I" equivalent, and by a good margin. Just try to compare fx 8120 + sabretooth 990fx or any other medium-high quality motherboard with the i2500k + equivalent, and you will see what I am talking about. So if price/performance is the most relevant criteria to make your choice, go with this chip, you will not be disappointed. I am a software developer and I work with 3d (3dsmax) and at my workplace I have a comparable (but much more expansive) xeon e3-1230 based workstation-with an ssd drive etc. and, although I know the xeon should smoke the fx, I have to say that my machine (fx 8120, sabretooth 990 fx, 8gb corsair vengance 1600, crucial m4 256 gb)feels snappier. I am not a big overclocker but I am running my at 3.9 ghz (by raising the multiplier only) with no problem whatsoever on a scythe ninja 3b. I could push it way further but I don't feel the need, actually the chip was perfectly fine at stock speed, but I like a bit of fiddling :) . I can game pretty much everything at fullhd resolution with high/max details (radeon 6950). Again, if budget is a constraint but you still care about performance, buy this cpu and use the money that you are saving against an intel-comparable solution to get an ssd drive, which is simply the single biggest performance boost that you can have on a pc. The only real disadvantage is the higher power consumption 95 vs 125w TDP, but unless you run your pc as a 24/7 server with high loads, it would not be a problem. So not a perfect product, but a very good one to me. 4 stars, plus one for the very aggressive pricing, cool packaging and to support the competition, which lead only to benefits for the final customer.