Loads of cores. For not a lot of money
For enthusiasts, and especially gamers, it's tempting to think AMD’s FX CPUs have become irrelevant. Knocking together an argument to that effect doesn’t exactly demand mental gymnastics of Olympic quality, either. The argument would start with the fact that the Bulldozer architecture underpinning AMD's FX processors has basically been a failure. Even AMD is now tacitly conceding that if you listen to what it's saying about its upcoming Zen processors, which are designed explicitly to address Bulldozer’s shortcomings.
Even if Bulldozer had been a hit at launch, development since has been glacial. FX chips are still built on ancient 32nm silicon, while Intel CPUs are moving to 14nm. Making matters worse, AMD has let its desktop platforms and chipsets stagnate, too. Features like native support for USB 3.0 and PCIe storage? Forget it.
So, it’s not hard to see why conventional wisdom says that if you’re serious about your CPU, bag yourself something with an Intel badge. But conventional wisdom can get a bit smelly if you don’t occasionally kick him out of bed. So let’s take the AMD FX-8350 with as open a mind as possible.
The FX-8350 is based on AMD’s Vishera architecture. That means it's a 32nm chip with eight cores. Well, eight AMD-style cores, so four modules, each with a pair of integer execution units and a shared floating point unit. The idea is a slightly more hardware-intensive take on multi-threading, compared to Intel's Hyperthreading. If you think of it as a halfway house between a four-core Intel chip with Hyperthreading and a full-on eight-core chip, that’s probably fair.
Anyway, you get 8MB of level-two cache memory, plus another 8MB of level-three cache. The whole shebang is clocked up at a healthy-sounding 4GHz baseclock with a small Turbo boost to 4.2GHz. Oh, and thanks to those slightly elderly 32nm transistors, it's a fairly power-hungry chip with an official 125W rating. Finally, it drops into AMD’s long-standing AM3+ socket and pairs with DDR3 memory, which certainly gives a decent range of compatibility with current and quite a few legacy motherboards.
As for performance, it really is a tale of two halves. Anything that’s heavy on multi-threading makes the 8350 look good. It's got the measure of the Intel Core i5-4690K, for instance, in both Cinebench R15 rendering and x264 HD video encoding.
However, shift the focus to more mixed workloads or, God forbid, something truly single-threaded, and the picture becomes patchy. In the Cinebench single-threaded rendering test, for instance, it’s not even half as fast as Intel's i7-4790K.
But the picture in games isn’t actually all that bad. A minimum frame rate of 36 in Total War: Rome II is just two behind the hallowed 4690K for instance. That said, it's 10fps behind the 4690K for average frame rate in Rome. You could also throw recording your game session in the background into the mix, which is something the thread-happy 8350 is much better at than the simply four-core Intel chip. Then again, your graphics card might be able to help speed that process up and make the comparison moot.
To underline that the 8350 is based on an architecture on its last legs, the backdrop to all the performance numbers is overall platform power consumption that far outstrips all the Intels, even the six-core i7-5820K beast and its complex server-derived platform, complete with quad-channel memory and more PCIe lanes than you can shake a broken SATA drive at.
So, the 8350 is probably better than you might have imagined as a gaming chip and certainly looks good as an all-rounder, if video encoding performance is a big part of your computing mix. What it isn't, however, is a no-brainer as a CPU for a dedicated gaming box. And that’s just fine.
Great multi-threaded performance; tolerable gaming grunt; competitive price tag.
SPECIFICATIONS
CPU cores/threads 8/8
Process technology 32nm
Clockspeed 4GHz, 4.2GHz Turbo
CPU architecture Vishera
Socket AM3+