Needed an upgrade, as the mobo in my existing work box was maxed out at 8GB and this was not enough to run multiple Quartus II (FPGA synthesis tool) compilations smoothly. My current workflow involves doing multiple FPGA compilations at once. The compilations take upwards of an hour or more, and don't take good advantage of more than 2 cores; so I need to work multiple issues at once in multiple instances of the Quartus II environment.
At the end of the day the FX-8150 looked like a great bang-for-the-buck in spite of its known issues. The 8 cores should allow me to do many compiles at once without bogging down, given enough RAM (the compiler is a massive resource pig, consuming multiple GB).
So I've put together a system consisting of:
Asus M5A97 EVO
AMD FX-8150
Coolermaster Hyper TX3 tower heatpipe cooler
16GB ECC DDR3-1333
Seasonic 520W PSU
Corsair Force 3 240GB SSD (60 GB boot partition, 32GB swap partition, the remainder used as staging area for FPGA compilation)
Pair of 1.5TB Caviar Blacks in RAID-1 (storage)
Some cheap-ass Visiontek passively cooled Radeon card with dual digital out
Cheap DVD burner
Inexpensive NZXT mid-tower case with plenty of openings for extra fans
Cheap-ass USB 2.0 PCI card with a VIA USB controller on it (for some reason Quartus II's FPGA programming tool seems to work best with VIA USB ports, go figure)
Total price tag came in at just under $1,200.
So far, so good. I've been using it for about a week, and I really like it. Individual compiles aren't much faster than my old Phenom II X4 box (not that I expected them to be), but I can run 4 builds at once and the only indication anything out of the ordinary is going on is that the TX3 intermittently becomes audible as it spools up to keep those 8 cores cool. The system remains incredibly smooth and responsive throughout (the old system got laggy as all of the CPU cores got pegged, and became all but unusable as things intermittently spilled over into the swap file at certain points in the compilation).
The only weirdnesses I've hit so far all relate to power management and monitoring in Linux:
1) Enabling Cool-n-Quiet on this system crashes the Linux jack audio stack. But, disabling CnQ doesn't seem to increase idle power draw, temps, or noise by a huge amount; apparently the CPU is pretty good at managing its own power usage based on load even when the core clocks aren't being throttled down. It also helps that this motherboard has good thermal CPU fan speed control (which works even when CnQ is off).
2) The CPU temperature and fan speed sensors on the M5A97 EVO weren't supported out-of-box; I had to chase down (and compile from source) a driver for the monitoring chip Asus used.
3) For some strange reason, Linux is reporting that the cores are all idling at 3.9GHz (with CnQ off... with CnQ on they were idling at 1.6GHz IIRC). Stock for the FX-8150 is supposed to be 3.6GHz; 3.9GHz is the level 1 "turbo core" speed (level 2 is 4.2GHz). WTF? But as long as the temps and noise are reasonable, I guess I don't really care... with no load temps are in mid-30s and the fan is silent, which is fine by me.
Edit: At full load, CPU temp seems to peak a degree or two above whatever I set as the "100% CPU fan speed" temperature threshold in the BIOS; given that the max temp for the FX-8150 is 61C, I've set the threshold to 55C to minimize the amount of time the fan runs full throttle while also keeping the CPU temps within spec.