I recently sold the FX 8350 I bought from Virtual Larry. I had a thread revisiting that CPU a few years back -
https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...ime-to-talk-about-it-because-reasons.2581021/
What's important to remember is that by the time Haswell showed up, you could get a FX 8320e on sale for less than the cheapest i3, and an FX 8350 on sale for the same or a little more than the most expensive i3. Newegg would fire sale FX like that every few months.
The i7 was in a class by itself for mainstream users and priced accordingly. I paid less than a $100 for my 8320e and 8350 BNIB BITD. That's less than the i3 sold for. By contrast I paid $220 for the Devil's Canyon i5. Go watch RA Tech's vids I shared in that thread and tell me how the 2/4 and 4/4 Intel CPUs held up in more modern gaming on windows 10 vs similarly or lowered priced 8 series Vishera. Or even in more multithreaded games of the era like Battlefield 5 64p and Witcher 3. Richard from Digital Foundry was the first reviewer I am aware of to point out that in Novigrad the i3 and i5 were having frame pacing issues while the 8350 was providing a superior experience. I had some stuttering issues with a 3200G in that scenario with 100% CPU usage. My testing with the 8350 showed it to be better in the same situation with the same GPU, despite PCIe 2.0.
I completely ignore the bar charts tech reviewers provided. As RA Tech demonstrated, the testing methodology used was garbage. Letting benchmarks run, spit out data, then posting the results as bar graphs. lazy and inadequate. RA Tech has a video about it. Watch and listen to the benchmarks running. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Ivy Bridge i5 had audio issues, and failed to render assets and NPCs. It will spit out good numbers at the end though.
😛 RA was playing games and using discord on windows 10 (you know how many gamers actually use their gaming PCs) and experiencing audio issues on those old similarly priced Intel CPUs, the FX was fine. That said, there were and still are games where the better single thread IPC of those i3 and i5 Intel CPUs makes a positive difference to playability vs FX, which IMO is all that matters, the gaming experience. Not bigger bar better on charts. Most test suites were automated and or unattended. And certainly not jumping in 64p MP and playing a few rounds then reporting back. Instead testing early in games which is usually less CPU taxing. In game test runs, when not using canned, were and often still are, under a minute each, often under 30 seconds.
It's kind of weird to see people dunk on FX, when it was Intel that sat on their hands all those years and gave us basically the same CPU over and over with some price creep. Let me guess; it's AMD's fault for not being competitive. That explanation if given, is simping at its finest i.e. that it isn't just okay, but rather, expected, that the company dominating the industry can fail to push innovation and reserve more cores for HEDT where they could REALLY juice you for them. Yes indeed, the onus is on the underdog to prevent the competition's anti consumer practices.
I'll end this reply by saying I've used an FX 8350 with 990FX at up to 4.6GHz. I didn't push it because the extra MHz don't move the needle much after that. I tested with up to 32GB of 2133MT/s. I did that until a few months ago. It was still a very capable daily driver for internet, multimedia, and casual gaming. 2023 games kicked it in the jimmy of course. leading to the pronouncement of -
www.computerbase.de
youtu.be
