Power consumption, and the takeaway
One would expect a tiny increase in platform power-draw when idling with an over-volted chip.
Getting the FX-8150 to 4.7GHz requires considerably more frequency and voltage. Combine the two and the platform power-draw escalates by over 100W. There's no way of getting around this for now, folks, and you need to ensure that cooling is absolutely top notch.
Giving you pause for thought, we overclocked a Core i5 2500K to an all-core 4.5GHz using 1.3V. Under-load power-draw increased from 135W to a still-palatable 183W.
The takeaway
Taken with the elephant-sized caveat that your overclocking mileage may, and most likely will, vary, AMD's FX-8150 chip should be able to run at least 1GHz faster than its nominal 3.6GHz frequency.
Push it to 4.7GHz and performance becomes readily acceptable in many benchmarks, offering some of the highest figures we've seen from an AMD chip. The trade-off is burdensome to bear, however, as under-load power-draw jumps way, way up.
But an overclocked FX-8150 doesn't bulldoze the competition into abject surrender. Rather, tellingly, Intel's Core i5/i7 chips, while beaten in some benchmarks, stand tall. And it's not as if they're shy in the overclocking department, either.
A super-clocked FX chip is about as good as it's going to get for AMD for a long time on the performance CPU front, and it's a shame the chip minnow couldn't deliver this kind of performance in an out-of-the-box package.
Sifting through what we've learnt thus far, perhaps the sagest FX bet will favour the £150 FX-8120 chip, which shares the same architecture as the '50 and, one would presume, is simply rebadged to hit a lower price point. Now that wouldn't be such a poor deal if it overclocked to almost 5GHz, would it?
