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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frozen ox - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Yes please! This is the only reason I even read reviews about CPUs with more than 4 cores.JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
What kind of usage scenarios are you thinking off? Because virtualizaiton benches are very prominent in our AT Opteron reviews.Virtualization on top of the desktop is rarely done to run heavily loads AFAIK.
sep332 - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
I do keep some VMs running on my desktop but they are not generally loaded. I'm assuming, because of the power draw, these would not be a good choice for a dedicated VM server build?MySchizoBuddy - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Can they do opencl like the Intel counterpart?Ryan Smith - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Keep in mind that Vishera doesn't have an on-die GPU. OpenCL can run on the GPU or the CPU (with the appropriate ICDs), but we're almost always talking about GPU execution when we're talking about OpenCL.Beenthere - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Test after test by many reviewers using real apps, not synthetic benches which exaggerate RAM results, has shown that DDR3 running at 1333-1600 MHz. shows no system bottleneck on a typical Intel or AMD powered desktop PC. Even when increasing the RAM frequency to 2600 MHz. there was no tangible gains because the existing bandwidth @ 1333 MHz. is not saturated enough to cause a bottleneck. APUs do show some GPU benefit with up to 1866 MHz. RAM.fredbloggs73 - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Hey Anand, great review!Can we please some undervolting results of the FX-8350 like the i7-3770k undervolting article?
Thanks
dishayu - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
It's absolutely ridiculous that even though AMD has pushed out quite a nice and competitive product (in that price range), Intel has gotten wayy too big in the past 6 years that AMD was sleeping and i don't think they'll be pressured to do any price cuts still. So, even though we still have so-called-competition, Intel has a virtual monopoly and i can't hope that the new AMD releases will help drive prices down any more.dishayu - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
Additional thought : I do believe that apart from the power consumption, AMD has a more overall compelling processor with the 8350. Single thread performance has already long crossed the point where you could tell the difference in experience between AMD and Intel (the exception to this is gaming). And AMD is better in heavily threaded applications.So, IF ONLY they could fix the power problem, i wouldn't hesitate to recommend an AMD system for any other purpose than gaming. Just my 2 cents.
figus77 - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
But really... even in games where is the bottleneck with an FX?Remember than in 99% on monitor youìve got a 60hz refresh rate and you can't see more than 60 without glitches fps on that screen, so what's the difference beetween 85 or 95 fps??
I've got an FX8120@3.6ghz with an hd6950@6970 really i can't find a single game that didn't run smooth in 1920x1080 and playing to skyrim with 4 core allocated to the game while 2 pairs of other core are doing video processing on 2 anime episodes is pleasing :-)