AMD FX-8350 (AM3+) Piledriver Processor Review

This year has primarily been about Intel with their success of Ivy Bridge and the Z77 platform, but we mustn’t forget about AMD as they still take a chunk of the market that appeals to the budget conscious who want the very best performance, but can’t afford to spend the prices that Intel warrant. Sure you may not get the same performance, but you’ll still have a partner at the end of it all that you can take to the cinema and of course wine and dine, that’s not something you can do with an i7 3770k as I hear they don’t like wine.

Going back to AMD, the release of Bulldozer wasn’t exactly booming as it didn’t quite offer what the consumer was expecting, and as they say; bad news travels fast and this dampened sales slightly, but AMD still held strong by keeping the price competitive and consumers realised this and the sales came in from all directions. We even tested our graphics card benchmark suite of games and applications with identical AMD/Intel systems, only to find that the AMD system performed the same, but a saving of over £150 could be had when looking at a like-for-like system from the red team.

So what have they done exactly with the 8350? They’ve increased the speed to 4GHz and improved the technology and architecture, allowing for much better results than what we originally saw on the FX-8150. We can now see the 8350 competing against the i5 3570k in quite full force. Looking at the benchmarks, we saw some amazing results that surpassed the original 8150 with its 3.6GHz clock speed, and even saw the 8350 pushing equal or sometimes past some of the Intel processors including the i5 3570k, i7 3770k and even the extreme 3960X which can retail at around the £800 mark.

The joy of AMD and the 8350 is that it still utilises the AM3+ socket and 990Fx chipset allowing consumers with older generation processors on this platform to easily upgrade to the new range of FX CPUs without spending an arm and a leg like Intel expect you to do and this is another big brownie point to AMD and falls right where they want it to in the pricing war strategy.

Overclocking on this CPU was something that quite surprised me. Not by just how easy it was, but the results that we got in the end and how they helped boost the performance overall. To get a final overclock of 5.1GHz was so simple with the Asus Crosshair V motherboard, as it’s renowned for its ease of overclocking and when paired up with a top of the range CPU, its clear to see why. 5.1GHz is a great achievement for us as we were only using an all-in-one closed loop watercooling unit and with the prospect of sub-zero temperatures and LN2 being thrown into the mix, you should start to see some pretty hefty world records being broken.

While the CPU did perform well across a multitude of tests, showing some really strong, and frankly amazing numbers, we don’t feel that it warrants receiving our extreme performance award, and while the the overclocking side of things proved to be fantastic, we feel that it deserves a little bit more and in terms of innovation, AMD certainly have learnt their lesson from the FX-8150 and improved on it and have released a product that can start to rival the competition slightly, but it all depends on what Intel have up their sleeve.

Though their is one area that Intel can’t touch AMD on, and that is of course; value for money. With this particular flagship CPU priced at around the $195 mark, it really is a fantastic product for the money and offers extreme bang for buck for the customer, and that’s exactly why we feel it deserves just that; the bang for buck award.