The Vishera Review: AMD FX-8350, FX-8320, FX-6300 and FX-4300 Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 23, 2012 12:00 AM ESTGeneral Use Performance
We'll start out our tests with the 7-zip benchmark, a CPU bound multithreaded integer workload that looks at 7-zip compression/decompression algorithms where the IO subsystem is removed from the equation:
7-zip is almost the perfect scenario for AMD's Vishera: a heavily threaded integer benchmark. Here the FX-8350 is able to outperform the Core i7 3770K. In fact, all of the Vishera parts are able to outperform their price competitive Ivy Bridge alternatives. The old Core i7 920 does pretty well here thanks to its 8-thread architecture.
Next up is Mozilla's Kraken JavaScript benchmark. This test includes some forward looking js code designed to showcase performance of future rich web applications on today's software and hardware. We run the test under IE10:
If the 7-zip benchmark is the best case scenario for AMD, Mozilla's Kraken test is among the worst. Largely dominated by single threaded performance, the FX-8350 is significantly slower than a Core i3 3220. Only Intel's old Core i7 920 is slower here, and that's a chip that debuted in 2008.
Although not the best indication of overall system performance, the SYSMark 2012 suite does give us a good idea of lighter workloads than we're used to testing.
Overall performance according to SYSMark 2012 is within striking distance of Ivy Bridge, at least for the FX-8350. AMD seems to have equalled the performance of last year's 2500K, and is able to deliver almost 90% of the performance of the 3750K. It's not a win by any means, but AMD is inching closer.
Par2 File Recovery Performance
Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive
Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.
Crank up the threads and once again you see Vishera do quite well. The FX-8350 outpaces the Core i5 3570, and the FX-4300 falls only slightly behind the Core i3 3220.
Excel Math Performance
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A5 - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
The gaming benchmarks contain exactly 0 FPS games. You should really read the article before commenting.kevith - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
I could eat a dictionary and SHIT a better comment than that.CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - link
" The FX-8350 did immensely better in that gaming selection. Mostl gamers are not shoot-em-up fascist gamers. "LOL - wrong again, but your lefty whine was extremely amusing. Most gamers are shoot em up gamers, YOU LIAR.
GullLars - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
What they didn't show you is what happens when you OC the K parts from intel. They end up roughly in the same TDP as AMD on stock, and just crush them on performance, so if you are going to use the same aftermarket cooler and will overclock either pick, the Intel parts can go further and win across the board.Compared to the cost of an entire system ~$100-150 extra on the CPU for a 3770K might end up being around a 10% increase in total build cost, and giving you anywhere from 10 to 50% better performance (or more in some corner cases).
I'm happy with my OC'd 3930K :D (compared to to the rest of my equipment, the price was no problem)
Probably upgrading my C2D 2.0GHz + 8600GTM laptop to a Haswell with only IGP in 2013. With an SSD and RAM upgrade it has had surprisingly good longevity.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - link
Exactly, all the amd cpu unlockers, all the dang phenom 2 overlcockers - totally silent.The 2500K smoke sit up to 4500mhz like butter, but heck, when something is freaking GREAT and it's not in amd's advantage, it's memory hole time, it's ignore it completely after barely mentioning it, and just as often continue to declare it an unused and unliked and proprietary failure that holds everyone back - whatever can be done to lie and skew and spin.
It's just amazing isn't it.
eanazag - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
I had pretty low expectations admittedly and for good reason. This is a great step because I would have to think platform vs. platform where before I didn't even need to consider it. Intel has a huge thermal advantage, which indicates that Intel could easily come out with a proc at anytime to take advantage of that headroom should AMD ever become slightly threatening, and sadly still be below performance per Watt. I could reasonably consider AMD now for my desktop. Where AMD fails is at the platform level. They have underperformed in the motherboard department. If they wanted to sell more, they need to give serious advantages at the motherboard + CPU purchase level versus Intel. They have been fine with a mediocre chipset. They failed when they locked out Nvidia from chipset development, same with Intel. AMD and Intel's greed was a big loss for the consumer and part of the reason why AMD doesn't compete well with Intel. Nvidia made better chipsets for AMD than AMDs ATI chipset development team.It is even worse on the server side for AMD. AMD needs to include 10GbE on the board to really question Intel and this is doable. AMD cannot compete on process (22nm and 3D transistors) unless Intel closed shop for 18 months.
CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - link
LOL - thank you so much.Yes, the hatred for nVidia (and Intel) cost the amd fanboys dearly, but they really, really, really enjoyed it when nVidia chipsets got shut down.
nVidia was going to be destroyed then shortly thereafter according to them, and thus we heard a couple years of it from their freaking pieholes - amd would drop the price and knife nVidia into oblivion... and bankrupcty... cause amd has a "lot more room" to price drop and still rake in profit... they said... LOL - as they whined about nVidia being greedy and making so much money.
Yes, they were, and are, nutso.
Oh the party days they had... now they have CRAP. LOL
Ken g6 - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Anand, I think you missed a diamond in the rough here for gaming. Obviously, if someone has the money for an i5, they should get an i5. But if they don't, the FX-4300 looks like a better gaming choice than an i3. There are cheap mobos available, so overall cost is less than an i3, and the FX-4300 is overclockable. OCed it may even approach low-end i5 performance - at a power cost, of course.tekphnx - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
For only $10 more I'd say the FX-6300 is the better bet. Slightly lower clock speed but still overclockable, and I don't think it will be that long before six cores become really relevant for gaming.lmcd - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Worst case you can probably disable a core and OC more, right?