AMD FX 8320's performance in games. Is it that bad?

[frozentundra123456]

Would you like to read the resolution the OP is running at and change your answer. The CPU can keep up unless it is defective.

Running at low resolution does not lower the burden on the cpu. In fact, it shifts the burden from the gpu to the cpu and makes cpu limitation more likely.

 

[KingFatty]

The motherboard can throttle the CPU independently of the state of the CPU.

Rather, the motherboard will try to protect its own VRMs when the *motherboard* VRMs get hot, and then throttle the CPU (even if the CPU itself is not hot).

It would be interesting to see if he can reliably reproduce the throttling in a predictable way, and then open the computer case and blow air over the motherboard's VRM heatsinks, and see if that reduces the throttling behavior.

 

[Kratos47]

@Jim Killer: I will confirm this from him and tell him to uninstall that, if any.

 

[TeknoBug]

I had an 8320 in my Gigabyte 970A-D3 for a while before I gave away the CPU to a friend's son, I had some fps stability issues in a lot of games and still kind of do with the 4350. Some 970 based boards don't play that nice with 8-core AMD's, but it handled my Phenom II X6 1090T great.

 

[Kratos47]

@TeknoBug
Hey man, appreciate the feedback. So would turning off their 4 cores help in that regard? I'm reading GA-970A-DS3P manual and i see it can be done in BIOS Advanced CPU core features.

 

[TeknoBug]

@TeknoBug
Hey man, appreciate the feedback. So would turning off their 4 cores help in that regard? I'm reading GA-970A-DS3P manual and i see it can be done in BIOS Advanced CPU core features.

Maybe, I haven't thought about that, when you go into the BIOS, hit ctrl-F1 to unlock the advanced option, it should be in that selection (can't remember the choice off the top of my head).

 

[Erenhardt]

Looks like heat issue. Try AMD OverDrive. There is the core monitoring which gives real thermal state of CPU in the form of Thermal Margin. If it gets below 10' (I believe its actually 5') CPU starts to throttle.

 

[loafbred]

I'm glad I happened upon this thread, as I have the same rig as a second PC for my nephew to game on. I haven't spent any time gaming on it myself, and it appeared to run well for him. After running OCCT on it, I got the same result as you, throttling constantly every couple of seconds.

I just did some research, and discovered that the culprit is a BIOS setting under "Advanced CPU core features" called "APM" (Application Power Management). Disabling this cured the problem. I left all of the other power management features at default. I have no throttling at all under load now.

 

[JimKiler]

I'm glad I happened upon this thread, as I have the same rig as a second PC for my nephew to game on. I haven't spent any time gaming on it myself, and it appeared to run well for him. After running OCCT on it, I got the same result as you, throttling constantly every couple of seconds.

I just did some research, and discovered that the culprit is a BIOS setting under "Advanced CPU core features" called "APM" (Application Power Management). Disabling this cured the problem. I left all of the other power management features at default. I have no throttling at all under load now.

That does not make sense, others are saying this CPU is not fit for even light games like Torchlight 2 /sarcasm.

 

[Erenhardt]

That does not make sense, others are saying this CPU is not fit for even light games like Torchlight 2 /sarcasm.

Some say it is a tabled chip and 150Watt space heater in one, which given its price, makes it competitive to any space heater+tablet chip bundle out there...

On more serious note:
I noticed aggressive throttling when running OCed fx6300 with uatx asus M5A78LM-lx mother board. It happened after a couple of seconds of OCCT stess test, but not in any game. Sticking some copper vrm rads increased the time when it operated at full speed. Setting a fixed (lower) voltage helps, as the stock voltage seems to be in excess.

OCCT is a power virus. If you are using your CPU for games, there is 0 chance you it will be pushed that hard. I find that Aida64 CPU stability test is more representative of CPU demanding game*

*CPU demanding game = heavy threaded (6+) game with even core load distribution. Not like many people here seem to think - if it runs like crap it doesn't mean its demanding on CPU (Arma3, SC2,etc), it means its not optimized and runs on (1, 2, up to 3) unevenly loaded threads, which means it is capable of using only 20-40% of maximum 8core CPU performance.