AMD FX-8350 review

The FX-8350 managed a score of 102 overall in our benchmarks, which is a 17% improvement over last year’s FX-8150. This also puts it on an equal footing with the Intel Core i5-2500K, which was our favourite processor from last year. However, this year’s equivalent, the Core i5-3570K, has pulled ahead with an overall score of 121.

The Intel processor also had superior core-for-core performance, as demonstrated when we disabled all but one core on both processors and ran our benchmarks again. In this core versus core comparison, the Core i5-3570K came out with 39 overall, compared to 27 for AMD’s processor.

It may have eight of them, but AMD’s cores aren’t as quick as Intel’s (CLICK TO ENLARGE)

The FX-8350 may be slightly cheaper than the Core i5-3570, but judging by US pricing (UK prices have yet to be confirmed) there’s only about 15% in it, so AMD’s chip can’t quite match Intel’s pound for pound.

As with last year’s Bulldozer chip, we could only take full advantage of the FX-8350’s eight cores by running two sets of our benchmarks side by side, so the PC was encoding two videos while playing back two high-definition videos at the same time. This put the processor up to 100% usage and led to an impressive overall score of 80, while Intel’s chip, with its four-core deficit, could only manage 59 overall. This is a pretty unlikely usage scenario, however.

When you’re doing some truly silly multitasking, the FX-8350 definitely has an advantage (CLICK TO ENLARGE)

The processor’s overclocked multiplier makes it simple to overclock. Using the stock AMD AM3+ cooler, we pushed the clock speed up to 4.4GHz, but this 10% overclock only led to a 5% improvement in our benchmarks, to a score of 107.

AMD’s new FX-8350 is a definite improvement on last year’s model, and is now easily quick enough for all desktop tasks. However, as with last year’s FX-8150, there are very few programs that can take advantage of eight cores, and the processor’s core-for-core performance still lags behind that of the Intel competition. If you want to run as many programs as possible at once this is still the multitasking king, but most new system builders would still be better off with Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors.