Is FX-8350 sufficient for gaming? I made a video myself so you can be sure.

[Prysin]

I REALLY want to see that for myself, honestly. I don't understand how that's possible. How big is the difference? Is it bigger than the margin of error?

score difference between my old FX 8320 thread 0 and thread 1 was about 23 in Cinebench R15.... If you dig around google you find others wondering wtf is going on too...

 

Would be fun if somebody would make a special FX driver, forcing the CPU itself to run Core 0 & 1 as "one core with One thread" just to test how strong ONE module are....

[Dabombinable]

score difference between my old FX 8320 thread 0 and thread 1 was about 23 in Cinebench R15.... If you dig around google you find others wondering wtf is going on too...

 

Would be fun if somebody would make a special FX driver, forcing the CPU itself to run Core 0 & 1 as "one core with One thread" just to test how strong ONE module are....

That's what I've always being curious about. If the single threaded performance with each module functioning was higher than that of the Phenom II X2/X3/X4 then I'd be a lot less pissed at them as they'd have actually made a CPU that is a true upgrade over their older ones. It'd also be possible to overclock it to near Haswell performance which you don't get with CMT in its current state.

[Morgan MLGman]

That's what I've always being curious about. If the single threaded performance with each module functioning was higher than that of the Phenom II X2/X3/X4 then I'd be a lot less pissed at them as they'd have actually made a CPU that is a true upgrade over their older ones. It'd also be possible to overclock it to near Haswell performance which you don't get with CMT in its current state.

Wouldn't putting it back together through a driver and making it a 4 module 4 threads CPU make something like an i5? Cause now it's like you took a good i5 and gave it a shitty hardware hyperthreading that's only good in certain scenarios, other than that it lowers the performance? I'm genuinely curious

Anyway I just wanted to show you that the FX series is not as bad as you thought in games, even if it causes some lags or stutters in older games or MMOs (Like TERA Online which I experienced myself, 20FPS in the main city but 95 outside of it for some reason) the games are still playable and enjoyable, in addition to that top AAA games run very well as shown in the video, as well as multithreaded tasks that one might need to use such as streaming or rendering run pretty well on these chips, am I wrong at anything? I mean it's a viable choice for some users, but all I experienced on this forum is bashing these CPUs to the ground like you couldn't even play Tibia or first Prince of Persia on them ;-;

[Dabombinable]

Wouldn't putting it back together through a driver and making it a 4 module 4 threads CPU make something like an i5? Cause now it's like you took a good i5 and gave it a shitty hardware hyperthreading that's only good in certain scenarios, other than that it lowers the performance? I'm genuinely curious

Anyway I just wanted to show you that the FX series is not as bad as you thought in games, even if it causes some lags or stutters in older games or MMOs (Like TERA Online which I experienced myself, 20FPS in the main city but 95 outside of it for some reason) the games are still playable and enjoyable, in addition to that top AAA games run very well as shown in the video, as well as multithreaded tasks that one might need to use such as streaming or rendering run pretty well on these chips,

 Hyperthreading isn't actually that bad, considering it simply allows the CPU to be utilised more efficiently. With CMT you need to base it off a strong architecture which AMD didn't or wasn't able to.  And the performance in theory should be very close to that of a Sandybridge i5-and we all know how well Sandybridge is still going after all these years.

 

I'm going to stand by what I've said with the FX series being bad for gaming as my friend who went from a Phenom II X4 to an FX 8350 (at the time he thought it was a high end 8 core-he's not as tech savy as me) noticed that performance was worse in every single situation. Also because of all the benchmarks against the FX series and people who themselves have noticed the difference, such as @i_build_nanosuits.

[TonyStark]

As an Intel user (i7 5930K) and an AMD fan for many years I can clearly say that AMD has a better value for money margin than Intel. but If you want top notch performance and you do not care about money then Intel is a no brainer. Now regarding the motherboard, yes it is true that AMD FX8xx0 series and over perform better on 990FX chipsets. I had an 8350 for a few days in my posession and I can tell you that FarCry 3 (FarCry 4 was not out yet back then) could not run more smooth than that. It had an amazing performace and it was the first time i saw all the cores having a workload from 20%-45%. The only thing that was botlenecking the whole setup was the chipset which was not 990FX.  Personally if i wanted a cheap gaming rig, I would go for an AMD system. All components though would be AMD from CPU to SSD....And I'm quite positive that I would not regret a single cent from that rig.

[Prysin]

Wouldn't putting it back together through a driver and making it a 4 module 4 threads CPU make something like an i5? Cause now it's like you took a good i5 and gave it a shitty hardware hyperthreading that's only good in certain scenarios, other than that it lowers the performance? I'm genuinely curious

Anyway I just wanted to show you that the FX series is not as bad as you thought in games, even if it causes some lags or stutters in older games or MMOs (Like TERA Online which I experienced myself, 20FPS in the main city but 95 outside of it for some reason) the games are still playable and enjoyable, in addition to that top AAA games run very well as shown in the video, as well as multithreaded tasks that one might need to use such as streaming or rendering run pretty well on these chips, am I wrong at anything? I mean it's a viable choice for some users, but all I experienced on this forum is bashing these CPUs to the ground like you couldn't even play Tibia or first Prince of Persia on them ;-;

No, it has the potential to me MUCH stronger...

 

Look at it this way.

 

my FX has 8 cores, ranked 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7

Core 0,2,4,7 was notably faster for me then 1,3,5,6 was in CB R15....

 

Basically this means, that in games that uses 4 cores or less the FX is fighting the i5 using 2+2x0.5 cores for a grand total of "3 full cores" worth of performance... Knowing the IPC is lower in the first place we end up with something weaker...

 

However, once we get to use all 8 threads/cores, it is on par or marginally quicker then the i5. Unfortunatly, there is like 10 games or so that can use all 8 cores properly, so buying a CPU that will only work great in a handful of games is worthless.

 

However since FX is good overclockers (most of them are atleast), if you could force it to run FULL FORCE per module. Treating ONE module as ONE thread... imagine the power of it.

 

 

Similarly, and this is a sidestep...

HSA.... Kaveri

I know some US university pieced together a botched driver to use the full computing power of the Kaveri chip, effectivly having a 12 core CPU.... But i cannot find that driver or any links leading to info on it only some shady news report saying someone at some US Uni made a driver or program to use a full kaveri chip as a CPU...

It is not far-fetched. OpenCL2.0 would allow you to do so, if you knew how to code for it... Knowing you got nearly 900GFLOPS of compute performance in the iGPU itself, the Kaveri APU, if "abused correctly" could potentially be the strongest CPU on the market, rivaling XEONS in raw computing power....

[i_build_nanosuits]

@i_build_nanosuits Wasn't a Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3 always one of these cheaper motherboards?

Anyway, you mentioned that a FX chip would fail in an AAA cpu intensive title, how is that? I mean assuming that modern AAA titles use all 8 threads of this CPU, it's raw performance is relatively good, if a game was so CPU-intensive that an overclocked 8350 was not enough for it, how would a 4460 perform? It's weaker in terms of overall performance (multi-threaded) isn't it? For example I'd like to see the usage of the 4460 in TW3 in Novigrad in spots that even my FX was at about 95% at times

Because the sad truth about this is that 9 games out of 10 even though it use many of your CPU threads will STILL be limited to how fast your fastest core can process the main thread for the game engine...so you're limited by one core being pinned in MOST games...overclocking will help some, but you still aint gonna catch up with the single threaded performance of an i5-4460 which sits in cinebench R15 single threaded at around 160 where as an overclocked AMD FX sits at around 110...

When it comes to gaming, 99% of the time it's not about ''how much you can process at once'' it's about ''how fast your fastest CPU core can process these sets of instructions'' when it comes to gaming it's all about speed, and AMD's fastest CPU core is, let's face it once and for all, really not that fast.

That's why.

And yes this board is indeed pretty cheap and it's similar to the UD3P i used to have, i think only the color scheme is different it still suffer from the same TERRIBLE UEFI my board had...it's in no way superior to any of these cheap ass B85 or H97 board you see on the market, it's just older and less efficient and it cost the same, and more once you factored proper CPU cooling, case fans and PSU in your build has PROVEN COUNTLESS TIMES TO YOU ALREADY.

[Morgan MLGman]

Because the sad truth about this is that 9 games out of 10 even though it use many of your CPU threads will STILL be limited to how fast your fastest core can process the main thread for the game engine...so you're limited by one core being pinned in MOST games...overclocking will help some, but you still aint gonna catch up with the single threaded performance of an i5-4460 which sits in cinebench R15 single threaded at around 160 where as an overclocked AMD FX sits at around 110...

When it comes to gaming, 99% of the time it's not about ''how much you can process at once'' it's about ''how fast your fastest CPU core can process these sets of instructions'' when it comes to gaming it's all about speed, and AMD's fastest CPU core is, let's face it once and for all, really not that fast.

That's why.

And yes this board is indeed pretty cheap and it's similar to the UD3P i used to have, i think only the color scheme is different it still suffer from the same TERRIBLE UEFI my board had...it's in no way superior to any of these cheap ass B85 or H97 board you see on the market, it's just older and less efficient and it cost the same, and more once you factored proper CPU cooling, case fans and PSU in your build has PROVEN COUNTLESS TIMES TO YOU ALREADY.

My motherboard has BIOS, not UEFI ^^ It's rev. 1.2 so it's an older version. rev. 3.0 has uefi I believe. I like BIOS cause I know how to use it, some people prefer UEFI cause it's 'easier'. Anyway yeah I do have a full tower case with 5 fans included and a twin tower 2 120mm fan cpu cooler, however I just did have these parts from my previous build.

I agree with some things you say, however you can't deny that for 185$ that I got my motherboard and my 8350 that apparently is a good chip, I could've bought an i3 and a shitty board (at least in my shitty country) and I wouldn't be able to stream games with it with such quality as I'll be able with my FX...

 

 

 Hyperthreading isn't actually that bad, considering it simply allows the CPU to be utilised more efficiently. With CMT you need to base it off a strong architecture which AMD didn't or wasn't able to.  And the performance in theory should be very close to that of a Sandybridge i5-and we all know how well Sandybridge is still going after all these years.

 

I'm going to stand by what I've said with the FX series being bad for gaming as my friend who went from a Phenom II X4 to an FX 8350 (at the time he thought it was a high end 8 core-he's not as tech savy as me) noticed that performance was worse in every single situation. Also because of all the benchmarks against the FX series and people who themselves have noticed the difference, such as @i_build_nanosuits.

I get why you might think that, but well at least consider what you've seen here, it all depends what games do you play, do you recall what games did you and your buddy test?

It will work good on AAA titles as you could see in the vid. Anyway, there's also this: For the 185$ I got 8350 and a motherboard that allows overclocks, for the same price I could've gotten an i3, with my FX I'm basically able to stream gameplay of even The Witcher 3 cause that was one the purposes of my upgrade. I wouldn't be able to do that, at least not with quality if I bought an i3 instead.

 

[Nena Trinity]

The problem with FX CPUs usually is that they cannot make enough draw calls on a single thread, and DX11 allows only one CPU thread to give draw calls to a graphics card or cards at a time. That's where the bottleneck is, and it doesn't matter if the rest of the CPU is being used or not because the lack of ability to give sufficient draw calls causes low framerates and stuttering.

Yes cause Windows is shit everyone knows OpenGL is far better!

[Dabombinable]

My motherboard has BIOS, not UEFI ^^ It's rev. 1.2 so it's an older version. rev. 3.0 has uefi I believe. I like BIOS cause I know how to use it, some people prefer UEFI cause it's 'easier'. Anyway yeah I do have a full tower case with 5 fans included and a twin tower 2 120mm fan cpu cooler, however I just did have these parts from my previous build.

I agree with some things you say, however you can't deny that for 185$ that I got my motherboard and my 8350 that apparently is a good chip, I could've bought an i3 and a shitty board (at least in my shitty country) and I wouldn't be able to stream games with it with such quality as I'll be able with my FX...

 

 

I get why you might think that, but well at least consider what you've seen here, it all depends what games do you play, do you recall what games did you and your buddy test?

It will work good on AAA titles as you could see in the vid. Anyway, there's also this: For the 185$ I got 8350 and a motherboard that allows overclocks, for the same price I could've gotten an i3, with my FX I'm basically able to stream gameplay of even The Witcher 3 cause that was one the purposes of my upgrade. I wouldn't be able to do that, at least not with quality if I bought an i3 instead.

 

Its only some AAA titles and very few at that.

[Morgan MLGman]

Its only some AAA titles and very few at that.

What do you mean? This seems rather weird. The games I mentioned and the games I put in my video weren't chosen by CPU optimization, it was as random as it gets in that matter. Hell, I had 90% of them before I even bought my FX.

The thing is, it's very tough to believe in so many coincidences, I bought these games cause I felt like playing them etc.

Besides why only so very few of these? I mean only more and more games use over 4 threads, even 2-3 years ago top titles utilized all of the threads, even the game in the video, Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2 is from 2013, kept all of my threads busy.

btw. if you have any specific titles in mind for me to test on the 8350 let me know, I might include them in my comparison video with the i5 mentioned previously.

[i_build_nanosuits]

My motherboard has BIOS, not UEFI ^^ It's rev. 1.2 so it's an older version. rev. 3.0 has uefi I believe. I like BIOS cause I know how to use it, some people prefer UEFI cause it's 'easier'. Anyway yeah I do have a full tower case with 5 fans included and a twin tower 2 120mm fan cpu cooler, however I just did have these parts from my previous build.

I agree with some things you say, however you can't deny that for 185$ that I got my motherboard and my 8350 that apparently is a good chip, I could've bought an i3 and a shitty board (at least in my shitty country) and I wouldn't be able to stream games with it with such quality as I'll be able with my FX...

no absolutely, i would myself pick an FX-8320 again over a core i3 in a heart beat unless the intention is to re-sell and upgrade soon after...and depending what type of games you play the most the AMD FX CAN be an adequate CPU for your needs, it depends...i think we've discussed this already.

And yes your CPU is a good one being able to reach 4.5ghz with less than 1.4V is not very common these days so you got lucky. I'm glad you like your CPU, it does have a lot more raw horsepower than any core i3 as of today that's for sure and for demanding modern AAA titles it will react as good or better as the little core i3...but not better than the ''real'' competing chips from intel in terms of pricing (at least here in north america) which are the i5-4460 and i5-4590, both of which outperform the AMD FX in every games out there whit better minimum FPS, better frame time variance and just smooter animation overall...but then again yes i know in some other foreign countries the AMD FX can be significantly cheaper than the core i5 even when factoring in the motherboard and cooling for AMD...i know

[Morgan MLGman]

no absolutely, i would myself pick an FX-8320 again over a core i3 in a heart beat unless the intention is to re-sell and upgrade soon after...and depending what type of games you play the most the AMD FX CAN be an adequate CPU for your needs, it depends...i think we've discussed this already.

And yes your CPU is a good one being able to reach 4.5ghz with less than 1.4V is not very common these days so you got lucky. I'm glad you like your CPU, it does have a lot more raw horsepower than any core i3 as of today that's for sure and for demanding modern AAA titles it will react as good or better as the little core i3...but not better than the ''real'' competing chips from intel in terms of pricing (at least here in north america) which are the i5-4460 and i5-4590, both of which outperform the AMD FX in every games out there whit better minimum FPS, better frame time variance and just smooter animation overall...but then again yes i know in some other foreign countries the AMD FX can be significantly cheaper than the core i5 even when factoring in the motherboard and cooling for AMD...i know

Well Poland is not a good country for techies sadly, a build from US PCpartpicker for 1000$ is better than a build that cost around equivalent to 1250$ that my friend bought for himself...

Do you by any chance know how much of a difference there is between 4460 and a 4690? It seems like 15-20% depending on the task according to the user benchmark site, but would it really matter? Unless the CPU maxes out at 100% usage on every core will there be any difference?

[i_build_nanosuits]

Well Poland is not a good country for techies sadly, a build from US PCpartpicker for 1000$ is better than a build that cost around equivalent to 1250$ that my friend bought for himself...

Do you by any chance know how much of a difference there is between 4460 and a 4690? It seems like 15-20% depending on the task according to the user benchmark site, but would it really matter? Unless the CPU maxes out at 100% usage on every core will there be any difference?

1- yeah i feel you i'm in canada and if you compare price between US partpicker and CA partpicker the difference these days is HUGE...

2- Well...it will depend on the application, if we are talking about gaming then most users won't really see any difference because they will be GPU limited most of the time even with the i5-4460...the i5-4690 is indeed slightly faster but not enough to justify the price difference most of the time unless it's on sale or something...but quite often the i5-4590 can be found for like 10 or 15$ more than the i5-4460 but the 4590 boost 300mhz faster out of the box...so in such cases it's IMHO well worth it...if you're to spend more than those two chips, just go balls out and get yourself an i5-4690K or a xeon E3-1231V3 i think.