AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer Overclocking On Ubuntu Linux

AMD Bulldozer overclocking is very easy. With the AMD FX-8150 and ASUS Crosshair V Formula motherboard, I had no problems hitting 4.70GHz with ease using AMD's Bulldozer water-cooling kit. Based upon the results of others, I am sure the eight-core processor could still have been pushed much further, but as said, overclocking is not one of the key focuses of Phoronix.

For those that may be looking at the AMD Bulldozer liquid cooling system, it's designed and manufactured by Asetek. It is incredibly easy to setup and works fairly well. With the Linux overclocking results in this article are also some thermal results when comparing the AMD/Asetek closed-loop water-cooling solution to a Thermalright HSF.

If you are new to overclocking, here is a page that was extracted from AMD's Bulldozer reviewer guide.

The system configuration used for testing:

These AMD FX-8150 Linux results are from the Bulldozer kit when running Ubuntu 11.10 with the Linux 3.1 kernel. The setup was tested with a Thermalright cooler and then the AMD water-cooling kit, at stock speeds then at 4.42GHz and 4.70GHz. The results are just meant to show the cooling performance and what sort of performance boosts to expect when overclocking the eight-core AMD CPU and running your favorite Linux benchmarks.