I Didn't Realize Just How Bad It Was... (FX 8370 CPU)

[Gerowen]

So about 7 years ago I set out to build myself the best AMD gaming rig I could with a budget of about a grand (ended up spending about $1,200).  This was a year-ish pre-Ryzen.  I ended up settling on the FX 8370 CPU, 16GB of RAM at 1866 Mhz (DDR3) and an MSI RX 480 8GB graphics card.  It did surprisingly well and I've enjoyed many great games on it.  Even today, I can fire up just about anything I want at 1080p with high settings and expect to get 60ish fps, or more, depending on the game.  There were some exceptions either way; DOOM (2016) gave me 100+ pretty much constantly at 1080p max settings, but Fallout 4 never wants to hit 60fps in down-town even when I turn down the graphics settings.  I knew that it wasn't the best CPU available even at the time, but it was 8 cores at a high clock speed for a reasonable price, and I wanted to do an all AMD build.  It was the first gaming PC I'd had in a very long time.  My last serious one before that had an NVidia GeForce FX 5500 GPU in it and I had been a console gamer since then, but when Sony ditched backwards compatibility with the PS4 and wouldn't even bring over all the digital stuff I bought on the PS Store through my PS3, they pushed me back to PC gaming.

 

So over the years, I never noticed any major issues when it came to gaming on the rig.  Battlefield 1 would hitch occasionally, but for the most part, it stayed at or above 60fps and everything was great.  And some of that hitching stopped when I moved from Windows to Debian Linux so that Windows Update or the disk indexer weren't trying to fire up randomly on their own while I was gaming.  Anyway, fast forward a few years and I grabbed myself a Steam Deck.  I hadn't gamed seriously in some time because of work and life, and I thought that having the option to pick it up and take it with me would be nice.  Plus, I'm a Linux enthusiast, and I thought it was kind of awesome to see a main stream device of this nature from a well known company shipping with a Linux distro.  Since getting it, about 99% of my gaming has been done on the Deck.  Despite the lower GPU grunt compared to my desktop, it's nice to be able to sit in the bedroom or wherever and play my games, and even when I dock it, with some decent AA and sitting 8 or so feet from a 55 inch screen, I don't mind the  720p so much, and some games, like Halo MCC, can even hit 1080p with 100+ fps on the little thing.  Plus, the thing draws like 20-25 watts under load while docked, while my desktop will draw over 400 watts to play the same game.  But I did make one observation.  While the resolution was lower, the framerate seemed more consistent.  Battlefield 1 for example, hitched even less when there was a lot of explosions and such happening, it seemed more stable on the Deck.  So that got me to wondering, was the CPU in my Deck holding up better than the 125 watt FX-8370 in my desktop?

 

So, I downloaded GeekBench on all of my devices, made sure no extraneous services like Steam were running in the background or anything, made sure everything's fans were working and that the CPUs were idling, and let them rip.  The results were startling to say the least.  I expected the Steam Deck to win in terms of CPU power, I had pretty much surmised as much based on my gaming experience.  What I didn't expect however, is that my Pixel 6a PHONE also thoroughly trounced the old FX-8370.  And this is with a minor overclock that put my FX-8370 markedly higher than the average score for an FX-9590, a 220 watt TDP chip that shipped with a water cooler.  So my cell phone, running on a couple of watts of battery power, the thing I use mostly just to send text messages and take photos, has more CPU grunt than a 125 watt desktop CPU from just a few years ago.  I knew the poor thing was struggling, but man, that's bad.  Even my Bluray rips for my Plex server have slowed to a crawl.  One of the desktop's only remaining tasks since getting the Deck has been to rip and transcode Bluray discs for storage on my Plex server, and I recently switched from x264 to x265, and the encode speed dropped tremendously to an average of 15ish fps in Handbrake.  These benchmark results make it pretty plain that the only reason it has done as well as it has at gaming is because of that RX-480 GPU.

 

I think it's time to retire the old thing but honestly, since I'm doing all my gaming on the Deck, I'll probably just build something in a smaller case with an APU of some kind.  All I really need it for is that Bluray drive, so I don't need a big chonker sitting behind the TV with a big graphics card in it.  All I need is something that can turn a Bluray disc into an ISO and then convert that into a play-able file with Handbrake in a reason-able amount of time, and not suck down several hundred watts doing it.

 

So anyway, here are the results from Geekbench.  The FX 8370 was the slowest thing I tested.

 

FX-8370 OC'd to 4.3Ghz - Air cooled with stock AMD "Wraith" air cooler
Single Core: 595
Multi-Core: 2549

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/1945133

 

Lenovo IdeaPad 330S w/ Ryzen 5 2500U - Hooked up to laptop chill pad for extra airflow
Single Core: 1094
Multi-Core: 3020

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/1945328

 

Google Pixel 6a w/CalyxOS - Case removed and sitting over an air vent to try and make sure it didn't thermal throttle or anything
Single Core: 1460
Multi-Core: 3490

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/1945378

 

Steam Deck - Docked with official dock
Single Core: 1253
Multi-Core: 4445

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/1945217

[Gerowen]

23 minutes ago, micha_vulpes said:

FX at launch was made fun of by generally all of the gaming community for having lower IPC and worse gaming performance than its predecessor while also being a power glutton ( at the time).  It bet the farm on high thread count and did fairly poorly in most situations or was "meh". 

 

That said is that an overclock assuming it is not thermally/current limited it should sit at 4.3 all the time without you even playing with it in most work loads other than slamming the FPU which would drop out of boost.

 

My 8350 had a 4.0 base, and 4.2 boost out the box, and ran fine at 5Ghz + before you got into clock stretching With an undervolt with a Hyper 212 + twin fans (and lapped). Even with that, by 2014 my Dell Laptop (m4800 with lowest i7 quadcore) was as fast or faster in Cinnebench, with better IPC. I actually used my laptop to convert movies for my media server since it was faster by almost 25% ! Compiling C++ code though the FX system was faster by about 15-20% when running 9 threads, vs the i7 laptop running 9 threads.

 

I Still got a FX8350 system a few months after launch due to the pricing. In many (non FPU bound) loads it could go toe to toe with intel chips that cost 20% more, though single thread /game performance was abysmal, and as soon as you saturate the FPU per compute module you effectively half its core count. But it was a great GPU for VM's and code compiling where you just needed hardware threads. Im not mad like some people are about the chips : I think they were a novel Idea, I think they worked well in some limited cases : but I think trying to position them as enthusiast gamer CPU's was a major blunder. They should have been marketed as entry level desktop workstation chips given they supported unbuffered ECC, had a lot of cores, etc

 

For a lot games at 60hz, I found it actually held up fairly well. But limitations of the system (PCie 2.0, poor IPC, lots of latency / traffic cop style issues at the northbridge) really hamper its ability to do well in high refresh rate situations or games that depend on IPC in general. The bus interface combined with low IPC choke down higher power cards once you get past the RX580 /1060ti level . One thing that IS interesting to note is because it has 8 real integer cores, In some modern games it actually can do better than lower core count (2C/4T and 4C/4T) entry level chips on AM4 and intel *whatever socket is around the same time*

The problem is once you start becoming CPU limited on this chip you just get lots of stutter, and massive frame dips. It just cant keep up with some things.

 

Doom ( and other Vulkan API games) as you found out tend to do pretty well on the FX all things considered

I've been kind of attached to the old girl just because it's worked reasonably well for so long. I tried to go beyond just locking it at its 4.3Ggz turbo and I've had it as high as 4.7Ghz, but even if it seems stable, it always eventually crashes. I'm debating on whether I lost the silicon lottery, or after watching LTT's recent video on power supplies, I've started wondering if my Thermaltake SMART 650w power supply is letting the voltage drop on the CPU power line when I try to push the overclock.

 

My current home server/NAS is running an old AMD Phenom II x6 1045t, so what I may do is just migrate the FX chip into being my home server system for hosting Plex, Nextcloud and Minecraft, maybe give it a better power supply from Corsair or something and leverage that GPU for Plex encoding if I can. That Phenom does ok, but when there's 4 or 5 of us on the Minecraft server and somebody forces a chunk load you can tell it struggles a little for a few seconds and I feel like the FX would give us a bit more overhead in that kind of scenario. I could even leave the Blu-ray drive in it and just have the server do all of its own ripping and such.

[SorryBella]

6 hours ago, Gerowen said:

7 years ago

OH MY FUCKING GOD IM GLAD IM NOT ALONE IN BUYING AN FX IN 2018. THANK YOU FOR SHARING MY SHAME.

[Gerowen]

Hate to resurrect a dead(ish) topic, but I just discovered some other reason to upgrade, though I can't afford to right now because my income is spoken for until I get back to work next week.  I played through the Final Fantasy 7 Intergrade remake on my Steam Deck and had a mostly positive experience.  Visuals were a little blurry when blown up on the big screen when docked, but the reason I chose not to use my desktop PC is because even though the game ran fine, there were random audio stutters.  Music from the little music shops, background conversations or sometimes the actual voiced lines during in-engine cutscenes would stutter, and once it started it wouldn't stop.

 

Apparently, while not conclusive, it seems to be generally agreed upon that the issue is caused by FX CPUs not being able to properly handle the audio engine in that game, especially in busy areas where there might be several separate channels of audio.  The game ran great on the desktop, 60ish fps at 1080p high, so that's why I'm not totally convinced the CPU is the source of the issue or it seems like I'd see a lower frame-rate.  Though, the lack of a particular instruction set or something I guess "could" negatively affect certain aspects, without affecting its ability to get frame data to the GPU.

 

This reminds me of playing the original PC release of Mass Effect.  The game will run fine, but there's a whole section of the game where, if your CPU is missing the "3DNow" extension, your character, and only your character, will turn into a black, pixellated blob.  There's community fixes and workarounds, but it was another scenario where it wasn't really a lack of ability to send frame data to the GPU, it was a different technical limitation.  The Phenom chips that preceded FX had 3DNow, but it was removed from the FX and Ryzen lines of CPUs.

 

With this game however, the only "fix" seems to be either to disable certain audio channels altogether, or just don't play it with an FX CPU.