AMD FX-8320 - FX-8000 Series Vishera 8-Core 3.5 GHz (4.0 GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 125W Desktop Processor - FD8320FRHKBOX

Pros: This FX-8350 is a beast, pure and simple. One of the best "bang for your buck" processors on the market at the moment.

Easy to overclock. I got 4.3GHz out of the box, stable, only using the motherboards (Sabertooth 990FX) default performance profile. I went to 4.5GHz on all 8 cores, stable, with only minor tweaking. However, do NOT attempt to OC unless you know what you're doing and fully understand the risks. In all reality, there is no need to overclock this processor, out of the box, at it's default speeds, it will handle just about anything you throw at it, period.

There are a lot of "benchmarks" out there, so there is no point in me repeating them, what I will do it give some examples of it's real world performance being at the core of my gaming rig.

The FX-8350 will handle any modern gaming tasks with out even breaking a sweat. It makes short work of all the "3's", Arma, Battlefield, Bioshock, Crysis, ect. I have yet to slow it down and I have tested a lot games on it so far, in addition to the aforementioned titles, Metro Last Light, Tomb Raider, Defiance, and many others. This processor performs well above it's price point at the core of a high-end gaming rig.

I also live stream to Twitch, record via Fraps, and host the occasional game server on my system, in all cases, the FX-8350 handles it easily.

Day to day usage, such as social media, HD video playback, and general "work" pose little challenge to this, or any modern processor. This thing is meant to handle much more.

Yes, it's not going to beat a high-end, and much more expensive, Intel chip when it comes to raw computation, but at it's price point it don't have too. I got this processor for my main rig since most of what I do on it, is gaming, editing, and broadcasting. Three tasks it can handle just as good as much more expensive options.

So if you're a gamer, looking for a inexpensive high-end processor, then the FX-8350 should be intensely considered. There are a lot of other longer reviews, and this is a lot shorter that what I normally write. The whole point I am trying to convey is that this is a great processor, it beastly for gaming, and at this price point it's hard to beat.

All you need to do is couple this processor with other good high-end hardware, and it will game as hard as you want it too.

Cons: None as of yet. It's stable, running cool, and doing everything I am asking of it.

One thing to note is that single-threaded games, especailly older ones, are not this processors strong point. It handles multi-threaded modern games far better. However, I have yet to find a single-threaded game it don't easily handle.

Overall Review: Windows 7 Ultimate 64
(This) AMD FX-8350 @ 4.3GHz
ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2.0
XFX DD Radeon 7970 Black Edition
EVGA GT 640 (Hybrid Dedicated Physx)
Corsair Professional HX850W PSU
Seagate 600 240GB SSD
Multiple Western Digital Black SATA 6 drives.
Cooler Master HAF 932

I am running it at 4.3GHz since, even though I had it Prime95 stable at 4.5GHz, becasue I am currently running on air (Thermaltake Frio), and there is little to no gaming difference between 4.3 and 4.5, so there is no point. I will see how far I can push it after I do my water conversion. I tend to "baby" my hardware, once I know it's limits.

This processor was purchased as an upgrade from the Phenom II X6 1090T (OC @ 3.8GHz). Also a fantastic processor in it's own right, but it was time to retire it to a secondary system. There is a noticeable gaming improvement between the two processors, more so in the more demanding titles. The FX-8350 is also faster when it comes to multi-threaded applications. This is comparing the 1090T at it's 3.8GHz OC and the FX-8350 at it's stock 4.0GHz.

Kudos to AMD for improving over Zambezi, which I decided to skip since the 1090T pretty much beat it across the board. This FX-8350 Vishera is a great processor at a great price.

Keep calm and game on!

Pros: 8 cores/threads
Improved my memory performance by 20%.
Its hyperthreading/memory improvements make all light load processing run much faster (Zipping, xvid encoding, running basic programs).

Cons: The fx-8350 on an overall core for core level, performs worse than my old OC'd Zosma (a thuban x6 with 2 cores disabled).
This doesn't perform as well core for core against the Zosma in heavy load processing (x264 encoding, heavy load benchmarks) but does have a slight improvement but only if all 8 cores are encoding.

Depressing IntelBurnTest (linpack) Results

-----ZOSMA x4 OC'd-----
Processor: AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 960T Processor
Clock Speed: 3.95 GHz
Active Physical Cores: 4
Total System Memory: 3325 MB

Stress Level: Standard (1024 MB)
Testing started on 4/30/2012 6:57:20 AM
Time (s) Speed (GFlops) Result
22.067 40.5071 3.220900e-002
21.989 40.6517 3.220900e-002
21.992 40.6458 3.220900e-002
22.074 40.4948 3.220900e-002
21.980 40.6682 3.220900e-002
22.068 40.5059 3.220900e-002
Testing ended on 4/30/2012 7:01:08 AM
Test Result: Success.
-----ZOSMA UNLOCKED TO x6 OC'd-----
Processor: AMD Six-Core Processor
Clock Speed: 3.80 GHz
Active Physical Cores: 6
Total System Memory: 3325 MB

Stress Level: Standard (1024 MB)
Testing started on 5/1/2012 9:18:04 AM
Time (s) Speed (GFlops) Result
16.380 54.5704 3.619693e-002
16.341 54.7035 3.619693e-002
16.352 54.6655 3.619693e-002
16.290 54.8745 3.619693e-002
16.333 54.7274 3.619693e-002
16.310 54.8073 3.619693e-002
Testing ended on 5/1/2012 9:21:23 AM
Test Result: Success.
-----AMD FX-8350 DEFAULT NO OC-----
Processor: AMD FX(tm)-8350 Eight-Core Processor
Clock Speed: 4.00 GHz
Active Physical Cores: 8
Total System Memory: 3325 MB

Stress Level: Standard (1024 MB)
Testing started on 2/13/2013 5:04:51 AM
Time (s) Speed (GFlops) Result
30.045 29.7520 3.548115e-002
29.692 30.1055 3.548115e-002
29.584 30.2147 3.548115e-002
29.673 30.1246 3.548115e-002
29.558 30.2414 3.548115e-002
Testing ended on 2/13/2013 5:07:52 AM
Test Result: Success.
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Uhhh yeah.. ^if that doesn't turn most people away it should.
And thats with 20% faster memory while on the fx8350.
OC'ing attempts on the fx-8350 have been quite annoying, cant even get to 4.5Ghz without a hefty 1.45v+ which runs just way too hot for my liking.

Overall Review: TLDR: if you need 8 threads get this if not get a x6 thuban.

i still cant understand how 8x4Ghz can be 25% slower than 4x3.9Ghz, you can argue that its cause i didnt OC cause the fx-8350 can oc to near 5ghz but 5Ghz would still only be 36Gflops on linpack and still slower than zosma quad.

I really wanted to give this more stars.
The memory performance boost will improve memory loading by 20% (but youll still have a hard drive loading bottleneck if you dont use a WD raptor/fast SSD drive), the memory processing boost is likely where a majority if not all of the performance increases on the fx-8350 are.

So here i sit bewildered at why a much cheaper quad zosma can encode x264 at 140fps while all 8 of the fx-8350 cores definitely running 100% can encode at only 170fps (this was a random movie i forget the resolution).

Overall i got this cause i needed more threads, i need to encode in background while i game and record more 1080p footage, which its useful for but i definitely feel id have been better off getting an official hexacore and OC'ong and using 3 cores for gaming 3 for enc.

SO overall id say if you NEED 8 threads get this, but the individual cores of the phenom II x6's run better than the FX cores, and the phenom 2 x6's will run every game faster than this processor minus the slight game improvement from the memory boost i got on the FX but i doubt everyone will get that.

As far as i know NO game require or even will use all 8 cores anything more than a quad will likely not improve your gaming whatsoever as 95% of games only will use 1-2 cores.

due to the fact that no mainstream games use or require more than 2-4 cores, they SO need to stop wasting time releasing cpus with more cores and focus on releasing cpu's with multiple clocks, i hope they put out an 8 core with 4x 5-6Ghz and 4x2-3Ghz on the same chip and have CCC or some app that auto sets games/high use processes to the fast cores and system stuff/junk to the slower ones.