AMD rejigs old hardware in an attempt to compete with Intel.
AMD has ceded the CPU high ground to Intel’s all-conquering i7 chips, but the firm still reckons it can fight in the mid-range – and that’s exactly where the new FX-8370E hunkers down.
This chip is different from the rest of AMD’s FX parts thanks to its ‘E’ suffix. It stands for ‘energy efficient’, and means it has a TDP of 95W. That’s a reduction from the 125W and 220W TDPs used by other AMD FX chips, but it’s still 11W more than Intel’s Core i5 parts require. That’s because the FX-8370E still relies on the toasty 32nm Piledriver architecture, rather than the 28nm Steamroller cores found in the firm’s APUs.
The power reduction means that this chip’s specification has taken a hit. Its stock clock of 3.3GHz can’t compare with full-fat FX, most of which start at 4GHz. The low-power FX closes the gap in Turbo mode, where its top figure of 4.3GHz matches the full-fat FX-8370. That’s a decent figure, given that the standard FX-8370 has 30 extra watts at its disposal.
This chip still uses the AM3+ socket, and relies on the same old chipsets. That’s a problem, as the top-end 990FX part doesn’t support USB 3 or PCI-Express 3.0, with third-party controllers needed to facilitate both of those now-common technologies.
AMD’s introduction of a low-power eight-thread chip still makes sense, though. It’s the first time AMD has released a 95W, eight-thread Piledriver part. Its £144 price puts it directly alongside the Core i5-4570, and is £30 cheaper than the Core i5-4690K. Both of those parts are Hyper-threaded quad-core CPUs with 22nm silicon, and the latter is unlocked.
An Intel-beater?
AMD reckons that this chip can take on the best Core i5 parts, but our benchmarks indicate that it can’t keep up. Its single-thread Cinebench score isn’t as good as the latest Pentium, let alone a Core i5, and despite closing the gap in the multi-threaded test, it still couldn’t quite topple its rival.
It didn’t impress in gaming tests, either. A Battlefield 4 average of 54fps is some distance behind a Core i5, and in Rome 2 the FX chip averaged 61fps – close, but still a couple of frames behind. In Metro: Last Light, however, the AMD part averaged 60fps, which was good enough to best every Core i5 part.
This low-power chip is still unlocked for overclocking, despite its low-power branding and specification, so we took the 200MHz base clock, multiplied it by 22.5 and upped the core voltage to 1.4V. The 4.5GHz core helped the FX chip catch up with the Core i5 in the Cinebench multithreaded test and the X264 video encoding benchmark, but its single-threaded performance still faltered.
AMD’s latest chip set out to prove a point on performance and power consumption, but this part merely demonstrates that AMD’s Piledriver architecture is too old to compete. It’s barely able to catch up to a Core i5, and its underwhelming pace is paired with still relatively high power consumption. And then there’s price, the Core i5 4570 easily has it beat. Mike Jennings
Vital statistics
Socket AMD AM3+
Core technology AMD Piledriver
Clock speed 3.3GHz (4.3GHz Turbo)
Cores 4
Threads 8
Lithography 32nm
Cache 4x 2MB L2, 8MB L3
TDP 95W