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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
250 Comments
View All Comments
Ukdude21 - Thursday, August 15, 2013 - link
Geez I think this intel fanboy should stfu and stop talking a load of verbal shit lol.redwarrior - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
I looked over the tests this character devised. ONly a few were multithreaded. Tom's Hardware had a very through testing procedure , explaining eacg application and what it showed about the architecture of the various cpus being compared. They were very balanced in single threaded apps and multithreaded apps. They did NOT do a lot of synthetic benchmarks because many of them are skewed in a prejudicial way. He also used win zip , photoshop cs5, video editing software, etc. Games were not all single thread shoot-em-ups, they were a collection of widely diverse games.. The FX-8350 came out ahead of not only the I5 3450 but also the I5-3570. He had some criticisms of course , but he said it was the best bang for the buck in the $200 price space. This review was shallow and meaningless done by somebody who either is lazy or on a mission to discredit. By the way The FX-8350 had the highest score on win zip bettering even the I7 3770. This reviewer owes us a well-designed retest and apology for a bunch of misleading garbage.silverblue - Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - link
Well, that's the beauty of product reviews - there are multiple for a specific product, and all with different tests. What you need to do is find the test that matters to you, and if it excels at it, you may buy it solely based on that (even ignoring bad points). If, on the other hand, it doesn't perform so well in the discipline of your choice, that is really making your mind up for you to go buy something else.CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - link
LOL - no that's the beauty of AMD's "we are not evil" LIE, and their "totally and completely proprietary build of the "open source!!!!!!!! not like nvidia physx!!!!"W I N Z I P
Now, all you freaking amd fanboy liars and losers have to be constantly reminded about your evil, sick, proprietary, "open source" AMD LIED AND COMPATIBILITY DIED - winzip BS !
LOL - let it dig into you fanboy, let it sink in deeply. All those years amd played your wet brains like limp noodles get played, and you scowled and spit and hated and howled nVidia and PhysX and open source and OpenCL and amd is not evil and they aren't thta kind of company and then you went and had the stupid 3rd grader amd gamers manifesto stapled to your foreheads....
LOL
You didn't find it in your evil fanboy manual to let your amd fanboy freind there know about the HACKING amd did on winzip ?
Tsk, tsk. for shame for shame.
Brainling - Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - link
Translation: I am either paid by AMD, or a total fanboi, and these benchmarks did not say what I want them to say. So I am going to come on here and plug a different reviewers website, that is known to be AMD biased, and tell everyone how unbias they are and how their conclusions are the right ones, because they agree with my world view.yumeyao - Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - link
I suggest stopping using x264 HD benchmark and looking for another test case.Let's look at what x264 HD benchmark does:
Source film:
MPEG-2!!! 6931kbps on avg, with a maximum bitrate of 12xxxkbps!!!
You guys know that MPEG-2 is DVD standard...... DVD has a resolution of 480p(720x480 for wide-screen), but for FullHD it's 1920x1080, 6 times pixels as DVD has! And dvd has a ~5000kbps bitrate on avg, so what quality of the source film could we expect??
And then let's look at its output:
OMFG! 8000kbps!! h264!!!! I'd say for such a source, 2000kbps is fairly enough for an h264 output....
So do you guys think such a test could ultimates a cpu's calculating potentials?
I suggest finding any ts/BD-ISO source, and use proper options on x264 (basically you can directly use --preset xxx), then use it as a reference...
Brainling - Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - link
It's 125TDP part that gets consistently blown away by the 95 TDP Ivy Bridge, which has more transistors and a smaller more modern node process....and at the high end, it's really not that much cheaper than an Ivy Bridge i5.*sigh* Oh AMD...how the mighty have fallen. Can the real AMD, the one that gave us Thunderbird and Athlon64, please stand up?
redwarrior - Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - link
To the Intel fanatics whose bottom-line is" My car's better than your car, my car's better than yours. What infantile sensibilities . The computer is a tool. A multifaceted tool that has 1001 purposes. The AMD technology meets the needs of 99.99% of computer users with a better bang for the buck. Only a one-dimensional person can say otherwise. Myopic gamers need to open their eyes and see there is a bigger world out there.CeriseCogburn - Tuesday, October 30, 2012 - link
Here we go again, the activist on another preaching rampage, with his attack on Intel cpu owners.... nice little OWS protest against the rich Intel people...You wouldn't mind then if I said I can't stand you cheap, broke, ghetto amd dirty little rascals who can't pay for themselves let alone the education they need to properly use a computer.
Not to mention your ignorance in supporting a losing, technologically backwards second tier set of idiots wasting monetary resources that could be spent on something good for the world instead of on foolish amd misadventures that pay interest on amd's debt and not much else.
You ought to support the company that pays a LIVING WAGE, instead of the one firing their employees, axing them over and over again.
Thanks for not being capable of properly acquiring and using a computer.
7beauties - Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - link
I've rooted for AMD against Intel before I built my first PC with the 700Mhz Athlon in 2000. AMD stole Intel's thunder to much acclaim. For a while AMD and Intel dueled for supremacy, exchanging leads, much like the tit for tat between Radeon and Geforce GPU's are engaged in. AMD's scrappy fight spurred Intel's clock to speed up its ticks and tocks, and the computing world benefited from this. It would be bad for all of us if AMD goes out of business. I root for the underdog, for David against Goliath, but David is lying on the ground and boasting of winning. It was embarrassing when the Phenom was so unphenomenal. Then AMD heralded the Bulldozer. Bulldoze what? The empty hype makes the truth more painful. Intel plans to integrate the South Bridge onto Haswell's die, and folks, AMD will lose teeth and get bloodied. I'm growing weary of being a sort of Cubs fan.