AMD FX-8350 Black Edition Pro Reviews

AMD realised some time ago that the decade-old Athlon CPU architecture was drawing to an inevitable close. Understanding that application workloads for servers, home computers and notebooks have naturally changed over time, it brought out the Bulldozer core about a year ago. Working just fine in multi-threaded applications commonly used in the server space, Bulldozer was, and remains, a little underwhelming as an all-round consumer CPU. Bulldozer's successor, launched today, is the Piledriver processor, headlined by the FX-8350 chip. It is better than Bulldozer's FX-8150 in almost every way, which means strong credentials in multi-threaded benchmarks yet only adequate performance practically everywhere else. Without taking the savage, expensive step of redesigning the entire core, AMD has done the only step open to it, that is, polished the Bulldozer architecture enough to pique enthusiasts' interests.

The AMD FX-8350 CPU improves company's standing against Intel but doesn't rewrite the rules of the game.

Like the Bulldozer release though, the top-tier FX chip is probably not the one that we'd really recommend. The £20 difference in price is negligible, and wont make a massive difference in what GPU you go for. The hex-core FX-6300, on the other hand, could be a much more tantalising prospect. If pricing follows the previous generation then you're looking at around a £70 difference, and that could make for that bump up to a HD 7950. The hex-core chip will also overclock happily, so you'll still get decent multi-threaded performance - easily as capable as the i5, for a lot less cash. An equivalently priced AMD hex-core machine then would make for a better gaming PC than an i5 3570K rig with a weaker GPU. We need AMD to be competitive to keep the PC market vibrant, and keep Intel honest. These new Piledriver chips should be able to do that, especially at the value end of the market. And if that pushes Intel to make better chips - maybe even a mainstream six-core desktop CPU - then that's got to be good for everyone too.

Recognizing that the power user community gives AMD more latitude than Intel, I anticipate a greater number of enthusiasts getting excited about FX-8350 than any of the Bulldozer-based CPUs, and rightly so. More speed, significantly improved efficiency, and a sensible price tag are exactly what I was hoping to see, and AMD delivers them all. Are you asked to make compromises? Yeah. Single-threaded performance still isn’t impressive, and power consumption remains a sore subject. But for less than $200, I can certainly see FX-8350 at the heart of a budget-oriented workstation. Would FX-8350 be my first choice in a new build, though? Probably not. Although I’m impressed by the work AMD’s architects have done in the last year, performance remains too workload-dependent. And, inexpensive energy aside, I’m going to go with the more efficient implementation when all else is close to equal.

Much like with AMD's recent A10 APU, we found a few things that we really like about the FX-8350, namely its improved performance for media creation and editing, as well as for other tasks that tax multiple CPU cores. We also appreciated the fact that it's backwards-compatible with recent AMD boards, sockets, and chipsets. (A new CPU socket always sets the bar higher for a chip line to justify itself for upgraders.) But we also noted some things that aren't so great, narrow the chip's appeal, and could spell trouble for AMD down the road. For one, single-core performance is still appreciably behind what we've seen in comparably priced Intel chips. And, perhaps more important for the FX line's long-term prospects, the FX-8350 is far less power-efficient compared to Intel's offerings.

Considering the performance of the chip, AMD was smart enough to price the FX-8350 at $195 so that it is in direct competition against Intel’s Core i5 processors. The price seems fair to us. In gaming, Core i5 still has advantage over the FX-8350 unless the game titles you play are either GPU bound or heavily threaded enough for you to use all of the eight cores. For common tasks, either Intel or AMD should be sufficient for average users. If you are running older Phenom processors, AMD has finally released a good enough chip that is worth upgrading to. If you are shopping for a new PC this holiday season, we would suggest you think about what kind of task and software you would be doing primarily with your PC. The FX CPU has its strengths and would be well-suited if you can take its advantage. Additionally, as a platform, AMD often offers more bang for the buck for those with a budget. Looking forward, AMD still needs to address its weakness in order to fully compete against Intel. With the Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge, we can see that desktop CPUs may not be clocked at higher than 4.5GHz even with a die-shrink. AMD probably won’t be able to crank up the clockspeed much higher than the 4GHz that is on the FX-8350 when the company transitions to the 28nm. If AMD does not improve upon its instruction per clock, it may have a hard time keeping up with Intel in the next round.

The bottom line is that the Piledriver FX series provides a quick, affordable upgrade for folks still using lower-end K10 hardware, but there isn't a lot to see for those running high-end Phenom II X4 and X6 processors, regardless of how cheap the new parts may be. For those building a fresh rig from scratch, Ivy Bridge will likely still be more attractive thanks to its superior single thread performance and efficiency.

What can I say? AMD has priced these new FX-8350 CPUs in such a way that there is no doubt: they make an attractive alternative to their Intel counterparts, and AMD seems focused on keeping that price difference no matter what. AMD can't take Intel over in number of chips produced and sold, but AMD has several options for you if you are looking for something different. AMD's pricing is, looking at the lower bracket of their new FX chips, interesting, especially with the combinations that are set to meet and beat Intel at price versus performance in every instance – if that is what you are looking for. If a bit of overclocking is what you are after, AMD has something to offer you here as well, although there's not really more in terms of raw frequency from what I have seen. More performance than the FX-8510 offered at those upper overclocks is definitely possible. The Intel 3770K costs nearly twice as much, but doesn't offer twice the performance.

AMD has taken a distinctly different path with the release of the Piledriver than it did with its predecessor. Last time there was no shortage of good looking company slides promising that the performance would be 1.6x the performance of some processor with an i7 in front of it, and it left people scratching their heads as to what that reference was to, and trying to locate that specific benchmark program. This time AMD seems to have done things a lot differently. Relatively little was heard or seen in the way of promises, but what showed up in that little green clam shell definitely delivered the performance promise of a year ago.

On a pure performance level, right now AMD offers a better bang-for-the-buck in the $200 CPU market than does Intel. If your AMD rig already sports an FX-8150, there's no reason to upgrade; but if you're thinking about upgrading from an earlier AMD or Intel system, an FX-8350-based system should definitely be on your short list.

AMD is keeping their head above water, and it looks like with Vishera we will actually see some product refreshes over the next year. Certainly the FX-6300 and FX-4300 will be getting updates, but I fully expect to see a 4.2 GHz base clock FX-8300 series processor down the line. As long as AMD is able to hang on and be a viable choice in the CPU market, then we as consumers will continue to be better served by both AMD and Intel. If AMD were to falter and vanish, then we would be stuck with a monopoly on the desktop PC side. At least in mobile we have some very aggressive ARM based products out there, but the desktop and server world will be poorly served by only one manufacturer.

The AMD FX-8350 has a number of strong points that make it a great choice for your computer. If you're looking to upgrade from an older system you really can't beat the price to performance ratio offered with an eight core 4GHz processor processor for only $195!

The FX-8350 provided a slight performance improvement over the FX-8150. However, we can’t tell if this improvement was caused by the use of the new “Piledriver” architecture, by the use of a higher clock rate, or a combination of both. While AMD has the lead on the USD 100 price segment, it is way behind Intel on the USD 200 price segment. Also, the company doesn’t have any product to compete against the Core i7 at the high-end segment. Costing the same and providing up to 30% performance advantage over the FX-8350, the Core i5-3470 is a far better choice. We simply can’t recommend the new FX-8350. For games, the performance is dictated mostly by the video card, not by the CPU. Therefore, some could claim that for games it doesn’t matter which CPU you choose. However, you will use the computer for other tasks, and the CPU from Intel will be faster for those. The only scenario where the FX-8350 was faster was on 3D rendering with Cinebench. This could mean that the FX-8350 is a better choice for professionals rendering 3D images. However, we believe this kind of user will prefer to buy a Core i7 processor instead.

AMD’s new FX-8350 processor may not be a revolutionary product but it represents the next logical step towards evolving a platform that will be around for the foreseeable future. After the lackluster showings of Bulldozer, Llano and to a lesser extent Trinity, AMD had something to prove and for the most part, they did just that. Naturally, there were highlights and lowlights throughout testing as the FX-8350 sought out way to overcome its predecessor’s missteps but there’s still quite a bit to like here.

Amazing for serious multitasking, but eight cores is still too many for most applications