AMD FX-8320 Vishera 3.5GHz (4.0GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 125W Eight-Core Desktop Processor FD8320FRHKBOX

Pros: -AMD budget pricing
-Works in older socket 939 (check motherboard support)
-8 "cores"
-Simple O.C., running 4.2 Ghz on stock voltage
-Media encoding

Cons: -Power consumption compared to Ivy Bridge

Other Thoughts: Upgraded from a Phenom II X4 Black Edition at 3.8 Ghz, and this 8320-Vishera excels by 30+% across the board. Handles my HD media encodes, 720p, DTS-HD audio, in under 32 minutes. Boot up time with SSD around 12 secs. No more hiccups during heavy gaming with intense physics engines. Lower power consumption compared to my Phenom quad core. Overall, excellent upgrade, works with my Socket 939 890GXM-65 chipset, easy overclocking, and lots of power!

Pros: Fast. Runs very cool @ 3.5 GHz. Stock fan is quiet without OCing.

Cons: It seemed as if I was going to break the latch when I was installing the stock cooler.

Other Thoughts: Stable OC @ just over 4GHz with stock cooler. The CPU fan is a lot louder at these speeds. WEI score 7.8 in Windows 7.

Pros: Look at the other reviews.

This is the best CPU money can buy. Seriously, you can't get a better bang for your buck. It's overclockability is breathtaking (granted you have the required headroom to do it). The Prime95 tests are handled well at stock and overclock. It works in conjunction with the 990FX chipset (duh). It has 8 cores (Which can be turned off all the way down to 2 active cores [think of all the energy saved!]). Easy to install; a fine piece of silicon to game, work, socialize (although you should opt for something less if that's your goal).

Cons: Some say they want pizza to come with this thing, others want a new car.

I wanted a purple unicorn that talks and can do magic, and it didn't come with one (such a dissapointment).

Other Thoughts: BURN. IT. IN. Prime95 for about three hours, let it sink into the depths of your motherboard and let it have fun with its new family. Overclock if you wish. serve with a side of bread. Feeds All and then some.

My Computer:
This chip @ 4.0 GHz
Gigabyte 990FX-UD3
Arctic Tower Cooler Pro for AMD with Corsair High Performance SP120 Fan
Everything else doesn't need to be posted

Pros: none

Cons: I am a Tech of 15 years. This is the 2nd processor I have RMA'd, each one failing the MP symmetry tests. Maybe AMD had a bad batch and hoped no one would notice. For anyone who doesn't know how important the MP symmetry is, look it up before you purchase. Never had any other problems with AMD ever.

Pros: Price, performance, better than other CPUs I checked at the same price point, better than my old i7 920.

Cons: Day 2 and the stock heatsink and fan have outlived their usefulness.
Installing them was harsh, too tight of a fit. There's a little lever made just for the purpose of tightening it, but that lever is almost useless because even in its "open" position THE PARTS DO NOT FIT and required more brute force than I wanted to use on a new CPU and motherboard.
Now the fan makes noise. It's cool enough under load but sounds ridiculous. I probably bent something trying to force it into place, and hopefully that accounts for the noise.

Other Thoughts: If you're not going to use the stock cooling anyway, count my rating as a 5.

Pros: --Temperatures: While playing several games, this bad boy NEVER (and I mean NEVER) goes bellow 50c!!
--Speed: This beast blasts through Farcry 3, Battlefield 3, planetside 2 (which in particular is incredibly CPU extensive!) and skyrim without breaking a sweat.
--Great stock CPU fan and heatsink: As I mentioned in the first bit above I have yet to see this thing climb above 50c even during heavy gameplay!
--Price: You simply cannot beat the price. When compared to the intel chips, which traditionally (and in this case) cost a great deal more money, this CPU simply blows my mind!

Cons: Sound: While it's not deafening, it's definitely noticeable.
Price: It wasn't free?

Other Thoughts: I bought a AM3+ motherboard about a year and a half ago along with a phenom CPU. That CPU quickly became dated and struggled to run games as time progressed. I was really worried when all the negativity came out regarding the steamroller line of AMD CPU's. Thankfully, the piledriver line of CPU's offer up a surprisingly powerful CPU at a very affordable cost.

I strongly recommend this chip to any gamers out there who are worried about going with AMD. Save your money and get the piledriver line of CPU's by AMD....take the money saved and put it towards something else like I did....like a graphics card or something.

Pros: Pulls less power than a first generation FX CPU.

Very fast on 8 core workloads.

Vishera is up to 20% faster than Zambezi depending on the CPU load. I was able to beat my WPrime 32M scores by about 18% compared to my FX 8120.

Loves high speed RAM. I have run 3X sets of mushkin memory(1600,1866,2133) on my two 8320s and all have run at 2050Mhz without issues, and all were overclocked to 2400Mhz without much trouble. *See Other

The Price for these CPUs is really one of there most attractive traits.

Cons: More variation in CPU quality than the FX-8350. If your looking for a sure fire 5Ghz+ 8 core without some serious cooling get the FX-8350. If you are willing to tweak your way to victory and have very good cooling these are definitely capable of similar clockspeeds.

Not as fast as an i5 2500K/3570K on workloads with 1-4 threads. If you like to multi task though the extra cores still provide benefit.

Other Thoughts: Most people will say you dont notice a difference outside of benchmarks on over 1600Mhz RAM but that info is a few generations of HW old. IMO its not worth using anything below DDR3-1866 with one of these CPUs is just leaving performance on the table that can really help in calculation intense applications.

Bottom line the price to performance ratio on these CPUs is phenomenal. These are quite capable of playing all the latest games, and are fun to overclock. If your a current Zambezi or older user this is worth the upgrade.

Pros: Low Cost, VERY easily overclocked to 4.5+ on significant air cooling...

Cons: NONE... AMD fanboy for life!

Other Thoughts: Can't wait for Steamroller!

Pros: My current Windows 7 build is very responsive and gaming is a pleasure. I plan to move to the Linux platform as my primary environment and slave Windows as a gaming layer, mostly for cutting edge play that WINE won't support. I have reviewed many performance related sites comparing this chip to the i5 and i7. The single threaded performance of this chip is not on par with the Intel offerings, those numbers cannot be disputed. Windows, Linux, open test suites, they all confirm this result. If you're on the fence as to which way to venture, you need to question your needs. Game performance has shown that screen resolution is what starts to make a huge score divide. Granted, the GPU plays the main role in that respect. Pure mathematical and hardcore scientific applications have been running circles around the AMD chips when operated on an Intel chip. The bottom line, for general computer use and great gaming, this chip will do just fine. If you need application specific performance I suggest you research it first as the current AMD/Intel offerings have pros and cons all over the place.

Cons: For my use this chip has no issues that would prevent me from recommending it.

Other Thoughts: To be honest I almost spent the few extra bucks i.e. +$100 and went with an Intel chip for my latest upgrade. Most all performance reviews come back very positive for their chips and so I did some research first. Intel chips have a smaller architecture and a bigger chip footprint. So naturally that equates to more transistors and more hardware in every hierarchy. More importantly though, they also have a very large optimization share of support. Intel's compiler is by far one of the best out there, a long with the support libraries. After some poking around on AnandTech and Phoronix it was clear that a large amount of the performance spread was simply due to the compiler that was used to create the end product, especially for Windows. Intel's compiler does not play nicely with chips that are non-Intel and that is by design. My target system is Linux, RHEL in the form of Fedora. The plan is to use Xen as my hypervisor and give virtualization gaming a shot. By moving to the open source branch I can compile source with GCC or whatever I choose to give my CPU the most effective compile build. Windows will only serve as my Direct3D 11 VM and since Xen will control schedules and cpu calls, Windows won't be calling all of the shots anymore.

Pros: This is an amazing processor. I have a pretty top of the line build and this has caused no problems for me, easy to install, never froze - I recommend 100%. Go for the 8350 if you have the change, but this does it great!

Cons: None at all.