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 ESTOverclocking
AMD's FX architecture was designed for very high clock speeds. With Piledriver we're able to see some of that expressed in overclocking headroom. All of these chips should be good for close to 5GHz depending on your luck of the draw and cooling. For all of these overclocking tests I used AMD's branded closed loop liquid cooler which debuted back with the original FX launch. I didn't have enough time to go through every chip so I picked the FX-8350 and FX-4300 to show the range of overclocks that may be possible. In my case the FX-4300 hit 5GHz with minimal effort, while the FX-8350 topped out at 4.8GHz (I could hit 5GHz but it wasn't stable through all of our tests). Both of these overclocks were achieved with no more than 10% additional core voltage and by simple multiplier adjustments (hooray for unlocked everything). The increase in performance is substantial:
The increase in power consumption is pretty bad however, you do pay for these types of voltage driven overclocks:
The 5GHz FX-4300 is pushed into FX-8300 territory, while the 4.8GHz 8350 is in a league of its own at just under 300W of total system power consumption.
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Operandi - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Looks like Piledriver delivered. Granted the bar was set pretty low with Bulldozer but this at least has a use case, highly threaded applications but considering this is a process node behind Intel I’d say its pretty good. If they can keep this pace up and hit IPC a bit harder AMD could be back in a pretty good position.silverblue - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
At least now they can say they beat Intel in a lot of multithreaded situations. Losing to Intel AND using more power was unpalatable. I'd like to see an undervolted 8350, perhaps AMD's conservative side is rearing its ugly head again.I'm a bit concerned that, even with hard-edge flops and the RCM, the clock speed difference is about 11% for the same power. I'd have thought that even the former would shave off a decent amount, unless RCM doesn't work so well at higher speeds. Still, there's one disadvantage to be had - overclocking won't work so well due to the flop change.
If AMD can beat Intel now in multithreading in most circumstances, Steamroller is just going to let them pull away. Single-threaded workloads are the worry, though. Still, at least they can say that they finally beat Nehalem even in single-threaded work. I did lament the lack of an appearance of Phenom II, but looking at the results, they've buried that particular ghost.
Finally - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Undervolting, you said?Here you go: http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/prozessoren/201...
Spunjji - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Thanks! +1 to that.CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - link
ROFL, thank you the 3 stooges.I'd like to particularly thank silverblue the little co amd fanboy who provided immense entertainment in that they lost, then moments later, they won, deranged fantasy spew. Good to know Stearoller is going to "pull away" !
hahahahhahahahahha
One for all and amd all won !
LOL
rkrb79 - Friday, October 10, 2014 - link
FYI I joined Anandtech just so I could tell you that you are a douchebag!!Taft12 - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
+2 in fact!An official lower-TDP version version of the 8-core CPU would be very nice. 95W or even lower as Intel does with their -S SKUs.
At my workplace, the i7-3770S has been just plain outstanding for our small form-factor server/workstation appliance that travels to tradeshows with our sales guys. I'd happily trial an AMD 8-core equivalent.
silverblue - Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - link
Happy to +3 you on that. :)CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - link
- 10 for the once again PATHETIC HACKING that is required for amd to be acceptable.(that's minus ten !)
LOL - fan boy fan joy fan toy EPIC FAIL !
StevoLincolnite - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
I wouldn't say it has delivered. Not yet anyway.Remember the Phenom 2's IPC is lower than the later model Core 2's and Piledriver still needs 700mhz+ to beat a Phenom 2, so that puts it in perspective.
Mind you, overclock the NB on a Phenom 2 and you can get some pretty interesting gains in the range of 5-15% depending on the situation.
However, like AMD has done for the last several years, they are happy to throw more cores at the performance problem, which is great, we just wish those cores were a little beefier or software to become more heavily threaded.
The other flip-side is this will drop straight into some AM3 motherboards and all AM3+ motherboards, so it's a worthy upgrade if you're running something like an Athlon, plus it's cheap.
But the consensus is that if you're still running a Phenom 2 x6, and you don't need 8-threads and mostly play video games, it really is throwing money into the fire in order to upgrade to the FX line, Piledriver or not, unless you intend to overclock the chips to 4.8ghz+ which the Phenom 2's can't reach on air.