Help me decide on a FX-8xxx CPU

[LTC8K6]

Great, some users managed to get it to not blue screen for at least 20 minutes. I'm sure that it won't have any long term problems at all, and that random internet users definitely know more than ASRock's electrical engineers.

Why would the 95W FX-4300 be officially supported, but not the 95W 6300 and 95W 8300?

 

[whm1974]

I know, I went cheap & didn’t seek AT advice. Big mistake.


Classic thing about it was I went amd for wife’s web/Facebook machine to save around $75.00. After all the various replament parts I spent approximately $125.00.
I ended up spending $50 more than starting with a proper i3 machine.

I replaced the crappy board with an Asus board, video crapped out on that one too, plus it had the super irritating thing on the box that stated 1080p video. I just assumed that would be DVI or HDMI. Nope it was analog only!
Crap like that should not be tolerated by amd. I know amd doesn’t make the board but they could have standards, like if you are going to use our logo you need to at minimum have DVI

Well you don't have to buy the most expensive board, something around ~$75-100 will do.

 

[LTC8K6]

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157581

Very similar board is still for sale.

 

[whm1974]

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157581

Very similar board is still for sale.

But why would anyone build a FX system in 2018 when an Ryzen based one will be much better?

 

[LTC8K6]

But why would anyone build a FX system in 2018 when an Ryzen based one will be much better?

Let people do what they want.

Maybe they have DDR3 and don't want to buy DDR4?

I have an FX-6300 system and it does all it's office duties very well.

 

[whm1974]

Let people do what they want.

Maybe they have DDR3 and don't want to buy DDR4?

I have an FX-6300 system and it does all it's office duties very well.

If you already have a working FX based system and it meets your needs, then that is fine. But I see no reason to build a platform in 2018 that is already 6 years or older at this point.

 

[AnitaPeterson]

OMG, folks, I logged on and saw all the replies.... O_O

I naively assumed this could be a fun project to undertake: a SFF HTPC with an eight-core CPU.
Right now, the board is mated to an unlocked Phenom II X4 B40 and 4GB DDR2.
I was thinking jumping to an FX and 8GB DDR3 was feasible.

I'm also a bit of an AMD fan (helping the underdog and all), so you could say I was biased.

I read a bit more in the meantime (thanks for the links some of you posted!), and I now agree with what seems to be the general consensus: this is not worth pursuing further. Aside from the memory bus limitations, the motherboard is only SATAII, so the present combination is probably the most one powerful/balanced one could hope for.

Incidentally, I must also (sadly) agree with those pointing out the heat problems on lower-specced mobos paired with FX chips... I've seen the heatsinks on an AMD 970 chipset going to 70 degrees Celsius (measured with an infrared thermometre), but I thought it was just a flaky board. When I was reading your replies, a completely different picture emerged.

Thank you all for your contributions!

 

[Fanatical Meat]

If you already have a working FX based system and it meets your needs, then that is fine. But I see no reason to build a platform in 2018 that is already 6 years or older at this point.

That’s exactly why I was wondering if it made sense or if it’s a just because project.
you can buy complete refurb i3 or older i5 systems for around $250

 

[whm1974]

OMG, folks, I logged on and saw all the replies.... O_O

I naively assumed this could be a fun project to undertake: a SFF HTPC with an eight-core CPU.
Right now, the board is mated to an unlocked Phenom II X4 B40 and 4GB DDR2.
I was thinking jumping to an FX and 8GB DDR3 was feasible.

I'm also a bit of an AMD fan (helping the underdog and all), so you could say I was biased.

I read a bit more in the meantime (thanks for the links some of you posted!), and I now agree with what seems to be the general consensus: this is not worth pursuing further. Aside from the memory bus limitations, the motherboard is only SATAII, so the present combination is probably the most one powerful/balanced one could hope for.

Incidentally, I must also (sadly) agree with those pointing out the heat problems on lower-specced mobos paired with FX chips... I've seen the heatsinks on an AMD 970 chipset going to 70 degrees Celsius (measured with an infrared thermometre), but I thought it was just a flaky board. When I was reading your replies, a completely different picture emerged.

Thank you all for your contributions!

I would budget for a new computer, maybe a 2200G/2400G based one if you don't want to pay today's GPU prices. Although if you want the Ryzen 2600 or 2700 I will advise you to go with 16GB of memory.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

OMG, folks, I logged on and saw all the replies.... O_O

I naively assumed this could be a fun project to undertake: a SFF HTPC with an eight-core CPU.
Right now, the board is mated to an unlocked Phenom II X4 B40 and 4GB DDR2.
I was thinking jumping to an FX and 8GB DDR3 was feasible.

I'm also a bit of an AMD fan (helping the underdog and all), so you could say I was biased.

I read a bit more in the meantime (thanks for the links some of you posted!), and I now agree with what seems to be the general consensus: this is not worth pursuing further. Aside from the memory bus limitations, the motherboard is only SATAII, so the present combination is probably the most one powerful/balanced one could hope for.

Incidentally, I must also (sadly) agree with those pointing out the heat problems on lower-specced mobos paired with FX chips... I've seen the heatsinks on an AMD 970 chipset going to 70 degrees Celsius (measured with an infrared thermometre), but I thought it was just a flaky board. When I was reading your replies, a completely different picture emerged.

Thank you all for your contributions!

You should look at the intel NUC’s for your next project. Kind of expensive but they’re small, quiet and energy efficient.

 

[amd6502]

OMG, folks, I logged on and saw all the replies.... O_O

I naively assumed this could be a fun project to undertake: a SFF HTPC with an eight-core CPU.
Right now, the board is mated to an unlocked Phenom II X4 B40 and 4GB DDR2.
I was thinking jumping to an FX and 8GB DDR3 was feasible.

I'm also a bit of an AMD fan (helping the underdog and all), so you could say I was biased.

I read a bit more in the meantime (thanks for the links some of you posted!), and I now agree with what seems to be the general consensus: this is not worth pursuing further. Aside from the memory bus limitations, the motherboard is only SATAII, so the present combination is probably the most one powerful/balanced one could hope for.

Incidentally, I must also (sadly) agree with those pointing out the heat problems on lower-spec'd mobos paired with FX chips... I've seen the heatsinks on an AMD 970 chipset going to 70 degrees Celsius (measured with an infrared thermometre), but I thought it was just a flaky board. When I was reading your replies, a completely different picture emerged.

Thank you all for your contributions!

I agree, the FX are not the way to go for SFF. Way too much heat and lackluster efficiency (unless manually cpufreq-set downclocking or $$$ liquid cooling) on any FX 8xxx (and all/most the FXs).

In a normal sized matx tower, they make great office machines; the multitasking is excellent; preferable in high load use over the A series which lack L3 and cores.

IMHO there's a lot of fun to be had in scrounging together spare parts and spending under $100 (or $50 or your price prefs) and making a nice workable useful system. But given that you already have a phenom II with four cores that's better matched to the caliber motherbird... you already almost have that. I think all that's missing is another 4GB of DDR2. Or you can get by somewhat comfortably on 6GB for a little while longer by adding 2GB.

The 65W Opteron would have some advantages over the 95W Phenom II, but the downside is you would waste that 4gb ddr2, trade in single thread for multithread perf, and need to sink in the cost the upgrade (cpu+ddr3). Overclocking is excluded due to small form factor. So for most this is all-in-all not worth it.

(As with ddr3, you can also recycle ddr2 sodimm laptop memory in desktops using sodimm memory adapters. It's a little bit more expensive for ddr2 (due rarer low volume sales) than for ddr3, which runs under $5 per adapter, but it would still be worth it if you have free 4GB+ ddr2 sodimms. As in any case, the most important thing is to make sure the voltages across all slots matches. )

 

[amd6502]

Why would the 95W FX-4300 be officially supported, but not the 95W 6300 and 95W 8300?

VRM quality might be too low. Ages ago I had a crappy MSI 760 p34 FX board that ran lower binning (higher voltage) 6300 95W fine, but it would not even post an 8350 which uses slightly more wattage, but most importantly, probably has low tolerance for VRM noise given its more sensitive voltage-frequency profile. Lower binnings are given higher voltages, and high safety margins, they can tolerate shoddy boards and poor VRM quality very well. MSI included the FX-8350 in the supported cpu-list; if they had done even minimal testing, they should never have done that.

 

[Abwx]

VRM quality might be too low. Ages ago I had a crappy MSI 760 p34 FX board that ran lower binning (higher voltage) 6300 95W fine, but it would not even post an 8350 which uses slightly more wattage, .

The 8350 use 100-105W where a 8300 or a 6300 is at 65W, if that s what you call slightly more power...

FTR a 8350 is better binned than the 6300/8320 but not as well as the 8370E/8300/8320E, the three 95W 8C were especially released for MBs that support at most this power and AMD was cautious to let a 20% margin (with Prime 95 small FFTs) for these SKUs.

http://www.hardware.fr/getgraphimg.php?id=61&n=1

 

[amd6502]

The 8350 use 100-105W where a 8300 or a 6300 is at 65W, if that s what you call slightly more power...

FTR a 8350 is better binned than the 6300/8320 but not as well as the 8370E/8300/8320E, the three 95W 8C were especially released for MBs that support at most this power and AMD was cautious to let a 20% margin (with Prime 95 small FFTs) for these SKUs.

http://www.hardware.fr/getgraphimg.php?id=61&n=1

125W vs 95W isn't a huge difference in my opinion (but 100-110W seemed to be where many cheap 760g mobos would start throttling, so some gamers thought this difference had enough effect).

My 8300 pulls almost 95W at full load (if my linux sensors command can be trusted). They didn't make AM3+ 65W FX's, which is why they're such a bad and impractical idea for SFF. (You could downclock them, and maybe some mobos even have some sort of cTDP profiles. Or invest in an exotic expensive cooling system).

FX-xx50's including the 8350, and 8370, 8320 have 125W TDP vs the standard 95W TDP of the FX-x300 and the later 'e' models.

I don't think it's the wattage that made the difference for the CPU being able to POST or not. I think it was just too much noise in the 12V power to the CPU due to low phase count VRM in some cheap badly designed 760g boards. I think this is the reason the 4300 is officially supported on this old AM3/AM3+ board while the 8300 isn't officially supported (but does according to geekbench profiles it seems to work for a lucky few).

 

[SPBHM]

OMG, folks, I logged on and saw all the replies.... O_O

I naively assumed this could be a fun project to undertake: a SFF HTPC with an eight-core CPU.
Right now, the board is mated to an unlocked Phenom II X4 B40 and 4GB DDR2.
I was thinking jumping to an FX and 8GB DDR3 was feasible.

I'm also a bit of an AMD fan (helping the underdog and all), so you could say I was biased.

I read a bit more in the meantime (thanks for the links some of you posted!), and I now agree with what seems to be the general consensus: this is not worth pursuing further. Aside from the memory bus limitations, the motherboard is only SATAII, so the present combination is probably the most one powerful/balanced one could hope for.

Incidentally, I must also (sadly) agree with those pointing out the heat problems on lower-specced mobos paired with FX chips... I've seen the heatsinks on an AMD 970 chipset going to 70 degrees Celsius (measured with an infrared thermometre), but I thought it was just a flaky board. When I was reading your replies, a completely different picture emerged.

Thank you all for your contributions!

if you don't already have the DDR3 it becomes less interesting, but I think used DDR3 is still a lot cheaper than DDR4
but for HTPC, the PII + 4GB might be good enough if you have a newer graphics card like a GT 1030

Sata 2 will cap things at less than 250MB/s, but realistically I don't see that as a problem for HTPC or the average user

the chipset temperature is not a big deal (but it can be if the cooler is really bad), the more worrying thing on these low end boards with faster CPUs is the VRM temp, but, you can install some heatsink or just position a fan to cool them down and it's normally very effective

 

[Insert_Nickname]

I naively assumed this could be a fun project to undertake: a SFF HTPC with an eight-core CPU.
Right now, the board is mated to an unlocked Phenom II X4 B40 and 4GB DDR2.
I was thinking jumping to an FX and 8GB DDR3 was feasible.

If the purpose is just as a HTPC, skip the FX and add a GT1030 and maybe an SSD. That'll handle almost anything you can throw at it. Phenom II X4's are still good enough for basic stuff. For extra CPU grunt, try and find a used 95W Phenom II X6 1035T/1045T. They have aged rather well, though pricing reflects that.

Proper boards that can handle higher-end FX CPUs are getting hard to find as new. Forget about mATX ones.

 

[Abwx]

My 8300 pulls almost 95W at full load (if my linux sensors command can be trusted).

There s something wrong, either your sensors or your bios settings, the 8300 shouldnt exceed 65-67W in MT and at most 80W in Prime 95, wich at the wall should yield something like 86-87W and 100W respectively.

An italian site tested the thing and the difference at the wall (in games) with a 8320E is 3-4W IIRC, that s 2.5W at the CPU level.

Also :

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2826261/asrock-n68c-gs4-amd-fx8320e.html

 

[amd6502]

There s something wrong, either your sensors or your bios settings, the 8300 shouldnt exceed 65-67W in MT and at most 80W in Prime 95, wich at the wall should yield something like 86-87W and 100W respectively.

An italian site tested the thing and the difference at the wall (in games) with a 8320E is 3-4W IIRC, that s 2.5W at the CPU level.

Also :

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2826261/asrock-n68c-gs4-amd-fx8320e.html

Wow, great link for this thread. I'm surprised this board was able to take an -e model FX after all. I'd not be surprised if the sensors command isn't all that accurate. I'm applying full load though (7 FPU intensive boinc threads, and random background tasks like system and idle firefox) on a better board (760g). I'm guessing the weak VRMs might be throttling the 8320e; I count 3 chokes on that VRM while mine has 5 chokes, which is above average for budget mATX 760g boards. I always thought most cheap 760g boards 3+1 and 5 phase vrm could at least handle the 95W FX's without throttling, but this board does seem bottom end. I think biostar also had a 3 phase bottom end FX board.

So wattage and noise may be why the 8 and even 6 core FX cores aren't officially supported (while the 65W Opteron 8-core is). The 95W FX-4xxx's listed in the support list may draw a bit less. (All we know is they didn't make the 65W TDP cutoff, so they wattage could be anywhere between 66W and 95W).

 

[LTC8K6]

The GS4 version of the board lists official support for the 8300, the OP's GS version does not.

EDIT: I guess I'm wrong, but I could swear I read that somewhere...

 

[Abwx]

Wow, great link for this thread. I'm surprised this board was able to take an -e model FX after all. I'd not be surprised if the sensors command isn't all that accurate. I'm applying full load though (7 FPU intensive boinc threads, and random background tasks like system and idle firefox) on a better board (760g). I'm guessing the weak VRMs might be throttling the 8320e; I count 3 chokes on that VRM while mine has 5 chokes, which is above average for budget mATX 760g boards. I always thought most cheap 760g boards 3+1 and 5 phase vrm could at least handle the 95W FX's without throttling, but this board does seem bottom end. I think biostar also had a 3 phase bottom end FX board.
.

As said those power limited FXs where released for eventual upgrade of older boards, so no surprise that this early AM3+ MB can withstand those SKUs :

AMD’s reasoning for these new processors, apart from the slowly increasing yields of the higher bin parts over the past year and tweaking the overall design, is because of the motherboards available on the market. Due to the construction of some of the early motherboards intended for AMD’s non-IGP line, these early motherboards could only support 95W or 125W maximum, let alone the 220W of the FX9590/9370 behemoths. By releasing an 8-thread Vishera processor with a 95W TDP, this allows these users to upgrade without spending an extra $120$200 on a new motherboard.”

https://www.anandtech.com/show/8864/amd-fx-8320e-cpu-review-the-other-95w-vishera

Currently a 8300 is less than 70€ here and the 8320E is not far from this mark, this cost less than a whole used i3/i5 PC, not counting that with the X264 usage pointed by the OP an FX would be much better since you can multitask at will while stressing the CPU with whatever heavy MT loading, wich is not possible with Intel CPUs below the i7.

 

[blackarchon]

If you want something fancy, there are also 65 W Piledriver CPUs with 4 modules/8 threads as well as 25 W and 45 W ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_...rocessors#Opteron_3300-series_"Delhi"_(32_nm)
They have the same Piledriver modules compared to the FX 4300/8300 CPUs, just with lower clock speeds.

 

[amd6502]

If you want something fancy, there are also 65 W Piledriver CPUs with 4 modules/8 threads as well as 25 W and 45 W ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Opteron_microprocessors#Opteron_3300-series_"Delhi"_(32_nm)
They have the same Piledriver modules compared to the FX 4300/8300 CPUs, just with lower clock speeds.

Yes, 65W is as high as I'd go for a SFF build, as I'm sensitive to fans spinning up to high rpm and the noise. 50W would be even more optimal.

65W Opterons 3xxx's would be a good way if you can get them cheap ~$50 or less.

For FX (95W) you can probably get away with SFF build if you manage your frequencies manually. Turbo freqs on Opterons aren't quite as nice. My 8300 has these freqs available:

available frequency steps: 3.30 GHz, 2.90 GHz, 2.40 GHz, 1.90 GHz, 1.40 GHz

If the highest freq, above is made available (3.3ghz) then the core is also allowed to boost to turbo frequencies (up to 4.2ghz).

What helps a lot in linux is preventing niced tasks from triggering the higher frequencies (esp turbo). Trick is setting the following to '1':

/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/ondemand/ignore_nice_load

see http://ee.freeshell.org/Slow/NOTES-2.TXT

So in the summertime (like now) I enable this, and lower boinc threads to 5. The threads will churn out slowly but with very little additional heat compared to idling cores. Sensors says typically between 60W and 65W while load average was 6.8, if you restrict freqs to 2.9ghz and below. Well, dozer was never known as a champ for great efficiency. (If phenom and dozer were clocked under 2ghz, it's possible that k10 might win?) Steamroller was no improvement as any gain by 28nm was more than offset by the dual decoder front end. It took until Excavator to totally change this. Those APUs are very efficient and suited for SFF.

 

[Arshad Hussain]

It's better to get yourself an FX6300(Vishera) rather than going to get an FX8XXX 95watts CPU. 6300 is powerful enough to handle your video things from streaming a 1080p video to mid-level gaming its is best in that case.

 

[whm1974]

It's better to get yourself an FX6300(Vishera) rather than going to get an FX8XXX 95watts CPU. 6300 is powerful enough to handle your video things from streaming a 1080p video to mid-level gaming its is best in that case.

Better off saving for a new computer.

 

[hasu]

I know how it goes .. find a new CPU for an old motherboard and then find a new motherboard for the old CPU .... it is hard to resist

But there are much better modern CPUs that are miles ahead, such as Ryzen 2200G and 2400G for a minimal but high performance PC. Depending on the current CPU, it may be wise to re-purpose that computer and wait until reasonably priced memory modules become available. If you have not done already, upgrade the hard drive to SSD to make the computer more responsive for the time being.