AMD FX-8320E CPU Review: The Other 95W Vishera
by Ian Cutress on January 13, 2015 10:00 AM ESTCPU Benchmarks
The dynamics of CPU Turbo modes, both Intel and AMD, can cause concern during environments with a variable threaded workload. There is also an added issue of the motherboard remaining consistent, depending on how the motherboard manufacturer wants to add in their own boosting technologies over the ones that Intel would prefer they used. In order to remain consistent, we implement an OS-level unique high performance mode on all the CPUs we test which should override any motherboard manufacturer performance mode.
HandBrake v0.9.9: link
For HandBrake, we take two videos (a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short) and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
For Low Quality conversion, the 8320E has trouble keeping up with the full-fat i3, but beats them by a good margin when the frame sizes open up.
Dolphin Benchmark: link
Many emulators are often bound by single thread CPU performance, and general reports tended to suggest that Haswell provided a significant boost to emulator performance. This benchmark runs a Wii program that raytraces a complex 3D scene inside the Dolphin Wii emulator. Performance on this benchmark is a good proxy of the speed of Dolphin CPU emulation, which is an intensive single core task using most aspects of a CPU. Results are given in minutes, where the Wii itself scores 17.53 minutes.
Dolphin historically prefers high IPC single core performance, which the 8320E is lacking.
WinRAR 5.0.1: link
The eight threads of the FX-8000 series show through here, beating all the i3 and some of our i5 parts.
PCMark8 v2 OpenCL
A new addition to our CPU testing suite is PCMark8 v2, where we test the Work 2.0 suite in OpenCL mode.
Hybrid x265
Hybrid is a new benchmark, where we take a 4K 1500 frame video and convert it into an x265 format without audio. Results are given in frames per second.
For x265 conversion those extra threads end up highly beneficial for the FX-8320E, nudging inbetween our i5 data.
3D Particle Movement
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. For a brief explanation of the platform agnostic coding behind this benchmark, see my forum post here.
While single thread performance is behind, the overclocked FX-8320E storms ahead of our FX-9590 results.
FastStone Image Viewer 4.9
FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and results are given in seconds.
Web Benchmarks
On the lower end processors, general usability is a big factor of experience, especially as we move into the HTML5 era of web browsing. For our web benchmarks, we take four well known tests with Chrome 35 as a consistent browser.
Sunspider 1.0.2
Mozilla Kraken 1.1
WebXPRT
Google Octane v2
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OrphanageExplosion - Wednesday, January 14, 2015 - link
I played Crysis 3 on an i3-4130 and an i5-4690K. On the jungle stages, there's a night and day difference. I suspect you would notice the same going from a 3570K down to an FX-6300. Most titles are GPU-bound, but CPU can cause frame-rate drops too.Cryio - Wednesday, January 14, 2015 - link
For Offfice an AMD APU A6 is more than enough.aphroken - Wednesday, January 14, 2015 - link
for office, a calculator and typewriter sufficesbarleyguy - Thursday, January 15, 2015 - link
Lame comment, seriously.My work laptop is a high end i7 (Dell 4800 mobile workstation), and my home office machine is an AMD FX-6300. The AMD machine feels every bit as fast.
For typical office applications, there will be no noticeable difference between an AMD and Intel CPU. The storage is generally the bottleneck, so a fast SSD is more worthwhile upgrade than a faster processor.
Even for development (which is why I have a mobile workstation), it's a barely noticeable difference. The longest part of a build is the unit tests, and they are mostly network bound.
AnandTechLies - Wednesday, January 21, 2015 - link
some guy trying to tell people to waste money on an i7. if you buy an i7 it takes up most of the money (unless you have a shit ton of money) and the rest of the Desktop Suffers and AMD processors are actually GOOD. This IMFORMATIVE website lies and has been caught faking their review benchmarks to make people buy intel over AMD, read my username and LISTEN also do not trust Tomshardware it makes up bullshit toD. Lister - Friday, January 23, 2015 - link
Do you think the regular aluminium foil is as good as a tin foil for making hats? Or can the invisible martian invaders read our thoughts through it?happycamperjack - Tuesday, January 13, 2015 - link
I agree! Complained about this before. These gaming benchmarks are some of the worst games to use for both CPU and GPU beside maybe Tomb Raider. Consumer enthusiast CPU market is pretty much dominated by gamers. If you are running irrelevant benchmarks, what's the point then?Suggestion for games to benchmarks:
Dragon Age Inquision: Incredibly well threaded and scaled. Hyperthreading actually gives a big boost in this game. A good indicator benchmark for upcoming Frostbite 3 engine games.
Crysis 3 or Ryse: Son of Rome: Very well threaded and scaled games. Good benchmarks for upcoming crytek games.
Maybes:
Far Cry 3: I'd suggest Far Cry 4 when it's fixed. Another very well threaded game that's a well representation of open world game.
Metal Gear Ground Zeroes: Good benchmark for upcoming FOX engine games such as the popular Pro Evolution series.
I would also suggest AC Unity if it's not so broken for multi GPUs. Yea SLI and Crossfire is still broken this moment.
MapRef41N93W - Wednesday, January 14, 2015 - link
Tomb Raider is horrible for CPU comparisons. One of the absolute worse GPU intensive games for testing CPU on the market. A Pentium G3258 can almost match a 4770k in that game.OrphanageExplosion - Wednesday, January 14, 2015 - link
Tomb Raider is useful for GPU testing as it's very heavy on GPU ramped up to the max but you're right in that its CPU usage is minimal.OrphanageExplosion - Wednesday, January 14, 2015 - link
I actually played Tomb Raider on a G3258 and a 4790K. With a 4.5GHz OC in place (and v-sync active), the Pentium was a total match for the i7. However, at stock speeds, the Pentium saw clear lag in CPU-heavy area - physics etc.However, the benchmarking sequence doesn't have any physics-heavy elements.
Reviewers need to start actually playing games and finding the bottleneck areas rather than just running canned benchmarks that prove very little. If that means fewer datapoints so be it. I'd rather have a smaller amount of useful data rather than a larger amount of meaningless data.