Great overclocker,good renderer bad for scietific software and high gaming!

World's first true 8 core processor available for the general public,very good performance for the price,however will work better with Linux/Unix than Windows.
Good overclocker if well cooled,you have a great OC motherboard and 1800+ RAM then 4.6-4.7 GHz is achievable.
The bad thing is that it's single threaded performance is miles away from Intel also it's inter-modules performance and overall RAM bandwidth performance is weak,mainly because of the old 990FX chip and some inside things AMD didn't designed and optimized well enough for an eight core CPU like the caching system for example,to make you have a pinpoint vision about it there are benchmarks like Cinebench where this thing is neck to neck with the 3570K,so yes indeed it has very good rendering performance but at the same time it has some very bad ALU scientific units performance,there are at least three of those wonderful scientific benchmarks available where this thing lags 37-40% behind the i5-3570K.Also it's FPU 3D unit will have a hard time trying to catch up with two HD7970s or two GTX680s in full HD,it will penalize such a highend setup with at least 20-25% gaming performance.
Due to the high TDP envelope achieved and the huge difference in temperatures between the inner cores and the outer pins,which are around 25-30 degrees Celsius I can't score this one with anything over 80 and this is judged mainly on performance/dollar.

Easily a better buy than an i7, more power, and less cost.

This is easily the most powerful processor I've ever used, and I work in Computer Electronics and Programming. We have i7 processors, and they just can't keep up with an 8-core system, even when it had less and slower RAM. I know this isn't even the most powerful processor in it's series, or even that AMD makes right now. I can't wait to get my hands on one of the Vishera Piledriver processors to try it out.

If i needed another. I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

Don't believe the hype that this is a bad processor to get involved with. I put it in my system and coupled it with 16gb of 1600mz ram and it BLOWS MY GAMES AWAY! its running a smooth stable 3.89 ghz right now and i could not be happier. If i really wanted to i could push this to 8.7GHZ with liquid O2 cooling but i just don't have that kind of overclocking craze.

I bought this chip so that my machine wouldn't need updating with major perhaps for a good few years, maybe a decade or so. sure graphics cards will get updated but this and the ram? not likely.

Do yourself the favor and invest in this chip!