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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klatscho - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
but at least priced decently.leexgx - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
still like how AMD think they have 8 full cores in there (some sites list the Modules not FP cores in their lists)8x is 4 Modules (4M/8T)
6x is 3 Modules (3M/6T)
4x is 2 Modules (2M/4T)
they hardly outperform stock clocked matched cpus (that they listed)
leexgx - Tuesday, October 23, 2012 - link
also to add if you own an Bulldozer (or Vishera) type of cpu you should all ready have these patches installedhttp://support.microsoft.com/kb/2646060
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2645594
Penti - Wednesday, October 24, 2012 - link
There are 8 fully pipelined integer cores in there, they are just very weak. Some of it is the shared frontend/decoder some of it is the integer execution units themselves. Weak SIMD/FPU-performance isn't the only thing it got. It just does so much less. You don't have two pipelines with separate resources to achieve SMT/HT. They need wider execution here. Preferably dropping the shared front end thing too. Makes no point of having it around, focus on making it faster and dump all that cache which does no good. Mobile/Notebook chips can't really have 16MB of cache any way. Just a few MB.DDR4 - Wednesday, November 7, 2012 - link
It's just a marketing thing, the cores don't have that much power, AMD's just looking to do better than Intel in one area.P39Airacobra - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
And you base this on the first that came to your mind to make you feel better about you over paying for your wimpy little 4 core Intel CPU with half the power of a FX-8320. LOLP39Airacobra - Wednesday, May 14, 2014 - link
Just kidding I have a i5 myself, But guys you really should stop being such fanboys. AMD has a great Chip here with the FX-8320 and FX-8350. They are priced much lower than the top i5 CPU, And they will perform just as well in gaming if not better. And who cares about it using 125 watts? 125 watts is a bit more than what Intel's i5's use , But it can still be ran more than fine with a High end GPU with just a decent 600watt mainstream PSU like a CX600.spooky2th - Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - link
Intel i5's can handle faster memory than any amp chip. They have a stronger MC plus they OC very well too. With the 1155 socket the amd chips were barely keeping up. Since haswell the speed champs are intel cpu's hands down and with the z97 boards and the new processors that will only work with the 97 boards, look out amd! Better OC'ing and handling faster memory than before!DesiredUser - Friday, February 12, 2016 - link
Currently, FX-8350 costs over $200.Used Xeon 5647 costs just $50 and beats a crap out of it.
Both support ECC. Go figure.
Homeles - Sunday, October 28, 2012 - link
Because performance = core count. Brilliant.