Question The FX 8350 revisited. Good time to talk about it because reasons.

[zir_blazer]

Can't wait for the real evolution of this stuff in 2-4 years. 8C-12C ~3Ghz each with ~50-80% IPC over Skylake I will gladely take @ 45w or so.

2 years? What for? Did you missed Renoir mobile launch? I think it is even better than your ultraconformist expectatives.

 

[AnitaPeterson]

Had one of the 8350s in my gaming rig. The whole thing is now my dad's work-from-home machine, still works beautifully. As long as the RAM chips are cooled properly, it will do its job for another five years.

 

[ZGR]

I loathe FX to this day purely for its poor gaming performance on some games. If we are doing a coop RTS match on Supreme Commander/Sins of a Solar Empire, or coop on KSP, the FX user slows the match down to a crawl, making it unplayable for everyone. Once the FX user quits, the game returns to normal. This is still happening in 2020 because they are still on FX.

For example, on SupCom Forged Alliance using LOUD mod, the FX user will cause the match to dramatically slow down around 30m in. An old Haswell @ 4 Ghz will slow down around 90m in, and at that point it is near max AI count.

I hate having to organize an event and worrying that some can't participate because of their CPU. I feel bad. Ryzen has helped so much, but it will take years for it to have the effect of killing FX entirely.

 

[blckgrffn]

I loathe FX to this day purely for its poor gaming performance on some games. If we are doing a coop RTS match on Supreme Commander/Sins of a Solar Empire, or coop on KSP, the FX user slows the match down to a crawl, making it unplayable for everyone. Once the FX user quits, the game returns to normal. This is still happening in 2020 because they are still on FX.

For example, on SupCom Forged Alliance using LOUD mod, the FX user will cause the match to dramatically slow down around 30m in. An old Haswell @ 4 Ghz will slow down around 90m in, and at that point it is near max AI count.

I hate having to organize an event and worrying that some can't participate because of their CPU. I feel bad. Ryzen has helped so much, but it will take years for it to have the effect of killing FX entirely.

See, this makes sense to me. If you are so dedicated to these (legacy?) titles that you are playing them years later, it seems prudent to invest in getting hardware that can run them well when that hardware is so much less expensive that it was back when those titles launched.

About 18 months ago I helped a friend upgrade his sons PC for his birthday/xmas. The main reason? He was playing a ton of Rainbow Six: Siege and was constantly being the last to load into the map and have some frame rate issues. His Dad had already done what he thought would help, getting him a 1TB crucial SATA SSD and a RX 580, but it still wasn't working the way it should. The troublesome CPU? A build I had also done for them years before, an FX 6300. We stepped up to a 2600x and a 1TB Intel 660p (I know, I know. I under provisioned it by 10% and it's what MC had in stock/on sale at that particular day when the dad said he was at MC and needed help buying stuff. Should be great for loading games, though). Problem *solved* however. It wasn't like he couldn't play (and I think he is/was part of some clan or guild or something) somewhat competitively with his old kit, but it was a primary hobby for him and it was worth the investment to make it work that much better.

Retiring hardware when it can't do what you want it to do anymore, that seems very reasonable to me.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

The FX line up under 8 "cores" is definitely not AMD fine wine award worthy IMO. And of course, as pointed out, even the 8 core has to be tuned and cooled properly, using both good ram and board, to get there. And I am certain there are older games that need one or two strong IPC, high clocked cores, which is its biggest OOF.

Now for a little humor about it -

 

[amd6502]

Oh it is finewine alright. For my DT the FX is doing just fine. As good as a 3600 sounds I'm sticking with it for another year at least.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Now, more and more people seem to be agreeing that Bulldozer was actually quite a cool concept that was too far ahead of its time and really needed another revision or two (and probably a better fab partner than GloFo), while Conroe in retrospect was another of Intel's mid-2000s hackjob solutions that just happened to work out really well thanks to AMD getting too ambitious for their own good with K10.

I've wondered a bit how a 4M/8T Excavator-based CPU with a proper L3 cache would fare. The Excavator core has massively improved L1/L2 performance compared with Piledriver, and isn't a half bad performer at lower power levels for it's time.

But I can understand why AMD didn't think it worthwhile with Zen1 in the pipeline.

That's why I stopped buying CPUs with huge TDPs, they are just not economical in the long run, unless you *must* have the fastest. Hated with a vengeance my Phenom II X4 965 140w CPU, had my fans on full speed all the time. Never again. 95w PL1 is about the highest I can tolerate these days.

I don't buy anything rated higher then 65W any more. Too much trouble keeping cool.

I've actually thought about reducing further to 35W, since such low TDP CPU/APUs are commonly available now. I don't really need that much performance these days. If I do, I have a dedicated system for it.

See, this makes sense to me. If you are so dedicated to these (legacy?) titles that you are playing them years later, it seems prudent to invest in getting hardware that can run them well when that hardware is so much less expensive that it was back when those titles launched.

If the titles can run under 10, many of these legacy titles are just fine on even a basic Celeron/Athlon. With a slight nod to the Athlon for the much better IGP. Old games mostly rely on a single thread anyway, and even a Celeron still has two full Skylake cores @ 3-3.5GHz. Even the Athlon 3000G has two full Zen+ cores with HT @ 3.5GHz. 10 years ago, that was higher mid-range $200-250 worth of performance. Now in a $55 package. With lower power consumption, and a much, much better IGP as a free bonus.

 

[amd6502]

Does anyone here know what AM3+ motherbird is required to run one of these Opteron 3000 series. I'm thinking of swapping out my 8350 FX on my windose box for an Opteron 3365 (65W/2.3GHz base) because the new forced windows update to 2020 H2 broke frequency control even further and leaves me in an awkward situation:

In the recent past (almost ~2 years ?), frequency control was broken in win10 builds, leaving the user (me) only two choices. Either run at the lowest frequency, 1.4GHz, or run with no limits, which for me means running all or nearly all cores under full load at base/boost of 4/4.2GHz, which is terrible perf watt.

My cooler ends up spinning to very whiny frequencies since I constantly have 5 to 7 distributed computing threads running.

Before the forced windows update, I had work around to this windows bug, namely to use AMD Overdrive which allows one to set a desired voltage and frequency for the top frequency. This worked quite well until this last forced update, and now it simply crashes windose whenever trying to use a custom freq/voltage in Overdrive.

Now normal people could simply limit the frequency through the BIOS. My problem is that I have an OEM motherbird, with no such option.

What do you guys think are the odds that my OEM board will recognize a 3365 Opteron?

Generally operating at the efficiency sweetspot, well above the 2 GHz bottleneck on feeding Fiji. Whereas >FX-8150/8350 were pushed for performance, for no real reason as interconnect delays killed any frequency benefit.

It seems that the 3380 is using half (possibly less) the wattage at 2.6 GHz as the 8350 is at 4 GHz.

So perf/watt has declined to 77% by clocking to 4GHz, and that's not counting the memory/IO penalty that running at 4ghz vs 2.6 ghz entails. That might be another 10% hit, or slightly more. End result for running at 4GHz might be 65% the perf/watt of running at 2.6GHz.

 

[Thunder 57]

Does anyone here know what AM3+ motherbird is required to run one of these Opteron 3000 series. I'm thinking of swapping out my 8350 FX on my windose box for an Opteron 3365 (65W/2.3GHz base) because the new forced windows update to 2020 H2 broke frequency control even further and leaves me in an awkward situation:

In the recent past (almost ~2 years ?), frequency control was broken in windose builds, leaving the user (me) only two choices. Either run at the lowest frequency, 1.4GHz, or run with no limits, which for me means running all or nearly all cores under full load at base/boost of 4/4.2GHz, which is terrible perf watt.

My cooler ends up spinning to very whiny frequencies since I constantly have 5 to 7 distributed computing threads running.

Before the forced windose update, I had work around to this windows bug, namely to use AMD Overdrive which allows one to set a desired voltage and frequency for the top frequency. This worked quite well until this last forced update, and now it simply crashes windose whenever trying to use a custom freq/voltage in Overdrive.

Now normal people could simply limit the frequency through the BIOS. My problem is that I have an OEM motherbird, with no such option.

What do you guys think are the odds that my OEM board will recognize a 3365 Opteron?



It seems that the 3380 is using half (possibly less) the wattage at 2.6 GHz as the 8350 is at 4 GHz.

So perf/watt has declined to 77% by clocking to 4GHz, and that's not counting the memory/IO penalty that running at 4ghz vs 2.6 ghz entails. That might be another 10% hit, or slightly more. End result for running at 4GHz might be 65% the perf/watt of running at 2.6GHz.

Your constant use of "windose" makes this hard to read let alone annoying. IMO spending any money on AM3 is throwing money down the toilet. My suggestion would be to save up and replace it.

 

[amd6502]

Your constant use of "windose" makes this hard to read let alone annoying. IMO spending any money on AM3 is throwing money down the toilet. My suggestion would be to save up and replace it.

Thanks, though for whatever reason, there is some supply crunch for electronics; even a low end 3000g is running $80 or more right now. Not a great time to build something new. A used opteron 3365 is $40 but I have no idea if the board will recognize it.

Maybe it's time for me to give up on distributed computing on this win10 box. Under linux it's so easy to use command line to control CPU (cpufreq-set) and power management options (by toggling /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/ondemand/ignore_nice_load ) so that low priority tasks don't spin up the CPU.

 

[Thunder 57]

Thanks, though for whatever reason, there is some supply crunch for electronics; even a low end 3000g is running $80 or more right now. Not a great time to build something new. A used opteron 3365 is $40 but I have no idea if the board will recognize it.

Maybe it's time for me to give up on distributed computing on this win10 box. Under linux it's so easy to use command line to control CPU (cpufreq-set) and power management options (by toggling /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/ondemand/ignore_nice_load ) so that low priority tasks don't spin up the CPU.

I have no idea either and I don't think anyone else here will be able to do anything other than guess to be honest. I mean, I'd guess it would boot, but would it work for what you need? I can't say.

Also newer hardware would likely use less power and be less likely to randomly die, so there's that. But yeah, everything seems more expensive than it should be these days.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

@amd6502

HWinfo64 or CPUZ may give you the model name. Or it is printed on the board, or can be searched using the PC model number. Then we can find the CPU support list for it.

Good timing on the thread bump too. Same guy just did a video comparing FX-9590 vs FX-8350 vs FX-6300.

I have been having a bit of fun messing with a FX6100 lately. FX was a mess for a number of reasons. Needed a good board, good cooling, lagged in single core performance even at high clock speeds, among them. But if you enjoy tweaking they are a good time. And turning on adaptive sync for single player titles improves things.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I have no idea either and I don't think anyone else here will be able to do anything other than guess to be honest. I mean, I'd guess it would boot, but would it work for what you need? I can't say.

Also newer hardware would likely use less power and be less likely to randomly die, so there's that. But yeah, everything seems more expensive than it should be these days.

With the exception of course, being the higher end parts. CPUs and GPUs are still sucking down 100s of watts in that tier. People went bananas over the FX9590 being 220W. Now everyone is all Anderson Silva with the "It's Normal".

 

[B-Riz]

You joined in 2018, this was all before your time here. If you were here, there would be no confusion.

I feel personally attacked I was on Sharky Forums before joining this place, but have been reading the site since Anand launched it, I have read every CPU review at least 2-3 times.

I still read the Socket 7 and Pentium 2/3 reviews randomly.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

I feel personally attacked I was on Sharky Forums before joining this place, but have been reading the site since Anand launched it, I have read every CPU review at least 2-3 times.

Heck, you joined shortly before, as Yoda would say - "Started, the flame wars have." You were here homey. BTW, I commented on an old thread where Sharky's was mentioned, not long ago. That was a cool site. *sigh*

 

[B-Riz]

That's why I stopped buying CPUs with huge TDPs, they are just not economical in the long run, unless you *must* have the fastest. Hated with a vengeance my Phenom II X4 965 140w CPU, had my fans on full speed all the time. Never again. 95w PL1 is about the highest I can tolerate these days.

I'd been on a dual socket P3 1.4-S from 2001 till about 2008. They both consumed less than then moderns CPUs. So I kinda hated all that TDP increase over the years. Desktop P3 TDP was what is now Mobile CPU. Can't wait for the real evolution of this stuff in 2-4 years. 8C-12C ~3Ghz each with ~50-80% IPC over Skylake I will gladely take @ 45w or so.

If you are so inclined, you can set Zen2 and Zen3 to custom max watts to be used, I have my 3900X at 120 ppt.

 

[B-Riz]

I was annoyed with the FX series as it didn't support my good quality AM3 board so I gave away my Thuban to a relative and bought a 1150 mobo instead. Later on, I remember seeing 95w 8300s regularly for around ~$100, though. Great deal for the money, no question about that. But yeah, too little too late.

AMD is no longer a budget brand, though.

Budget brand? WAT???????

They are not going to sell a halo product Zen3 like they had to sell Zen1, get outta here with that nonsense.

Zen1+ and Zen2 is still in wide supply.

Go to aaawave.com and get a 1600AF or AE, those are sold new at about average cost right now for the situation, the pandemic supply fubar-ness is real.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Budget brand? WAT???????

They are not going to sell a halo product Zen3 like they had to sell Zen1, get outta here with that nonsense.

Zen1+ and Zen2 is still in wide supply.

Go to aaawave.com and get a 1600AF or AE, those are sold new at about average cost right now for the situation, the pandemic supply fubar-ness is real.

That is what he is saying; "AMD is no longer a budget brand".

 

[B-Riz]

Years ago, Newegg had a refurb 990FXA-UD3 and 6350 on sale, bought em to mess with, but then a cheap new 8300 came up, and never used the 6350. It is still in its packaging.

Newegg sent me a NIB 8350 instead of an 8300, was kinda bummed, cause I wanted the lower stock voltage. I have since under-volted the 8350 and it is great for what it is. But, I do not use it that often. Hard to feel like playing with computers after work when I work on a PC all day.

I have also randomly acquired an extra 8320e and two AM3+ boards, the person said it and the boards were bad and the cpu was slow, but it they were just needing new thermal paste on the cpu HSF and mobo chipset heatsink.

 

[B-Riz]

That is what he is saying; "AMD is no longer a budget brand".

We all got spoiled by $85 1600 AF's and vaporware $119 3300X's.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

IMO spending any money on AM3 is throwing money down the toilet. My suggestion would be to save up and replace it.

You are being practical and logical, which has nothing to do with passion for a hobby. I bought the FX combo to save it from becoming e-waste, and because I have warm feels for it. I had 8320e and 8350 systems. I have always regretted selling them. Weirdly, I don't miss the 4690K Devil's Canyon at all. Which I paid as much for, as the other 2 combined. It aged badly as windows 10 versions, and games, changed, and started to hammer its 4 threads. Yeah, yeah... shots fired.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

vaporware $119 3300X's.

That's the one that makes me saltier than the dead sea. I was excited about messing with one, but I ain't laying out 3600 or higher cash for one. Or IOW, scalpers can suck it.

 

[Thunder 57]

We all got spoiled by $85 1600 AF's and vaporware $119 3300X's.

Sharkyforums was my forum of choice even though no one beat Anandtech for reviews. Shame that place, like so many others, went under.

 

[Thunder 57]

You are being practical and logical, which has nothing to do with passion for a hobby. I bought the FX combo to save it from becoming e-waste, and because I have warm feels for it. I had 8320e and 8350 systems. I have always regretted selling them. Weirdly, I don't miss the 4690K Devil's Canyon at all. Which I paid as much for, as the other 2 combined. It aged badly as windows 10 versions, and games, changed, and started to hammer its 4 threads. Yeah, yeah... shots fired.

It's true. 4C/4T did not age well. I never had an FX but I imagine they aged better than expected.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Years ago, Newegg had a refurb 990FXA-UD3 and 6350 on sale, bought em to mess with, but then a cheap new 8300 came up, and never used the 6350. It is still in its packaging.

Newegg sent me a NIB 8350 instead of an 8300, was kinda bummed, cause I wanted the lower stock voltage. I have since under-volted the 8350 and it is great for what it is. But, I do not use it that often. Hard to feel like playing with computers after work when I work on a PC all day.

I have also randomly acquired an extra 8320e and two AM3+ boards, the person said it and the boards were bad and the cpu was slow, but it they were just needing new thermal paste on the cpu HSF and mobo chipset heatsink.

PM me if you want to let one of the 8 threads go for a non Ebay "Are you joking?" price.