AMD FX 4100 

The AMD FX-4100 will work only on AMD AM3+ ready motherboards, but the good news is that sites like Newegg have 46 AMD AM3+ boards to pick from with prices ranging from $54.99 to $239.99.

Eventually I got around to placing it under water and now enjoy a 4.8GHz OC that is P95 stable (overnight) and the chip has yet to give me any issues.

he Corsair Vengeance 8GB 1866MHz memory kit was set to 1866MHz with 1.5v and 9-10-9-28 1T memory timings.

When it comes to performance we were shocked to see the AMD A8-3850 'Llano' processor and the Socket FM1 platform performing better than the AMD FX-4100 'Bulldozer' processor and the Socket AM3+ platform.

This particular chip clocked stable up to 4200MHz on stock voltage, and was still running cool, not breaking 35C with a Hyper 212.

Turbo mode on the FX-4100 runs at just 3.7 (4 cores at load) or 3.8 GHz (2 cores at load), so it doesn't scale as high as the FX-8150.

While performance at stock speed was downright sucky, performance improved quite a bit once things were tuned up.

We'd hoped for a lot more from this brand new AMD Bulldozer architecture, but the weak single-core performance, behind even the old Phenom II processors, makes us sad.

Our readers were clearly disappointed with the performance results and we don't blame them.

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.

After all, if it's just games that gets you going, we'd argue there's only so many cores you actually need.

I had placed a few of these in gaming builds earlier in the year.

I would strongly suggest trying this CPU for any new gaming build.

Despite the hype, the fact is PC games still don't scale all that well across multiple processor cores.

Of course, what really matters is actual game performance and here Bulldozer's per-thread gutlessness duly rears its head.