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

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amd6502

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I'm doing an unintentional dozer build due to an hp AM4 board (hp "Basso" used in elitedesk 705 g3 microtowers) having unexpectedly bad CPU support. Apparently HP Basso AM4 boards do not support any Ryzen processors (despite having a B350 chipset), and rather have support for only a range of excavator APUs:

u/Phlarfbar :
> Its almost like.. They dont want their computers to be reused...

For those expecting a cheap AM4 Zen build from these extreme budget 2nd market boards, the best one can hope for is a "poor man's 2200g" build via an A12, [eg A12-8870 which should likely outperform the 2200g graphics wise, with its 8CU high DP capable GCN 1.2 iGPU].

I had a very similar experience to this account, upon trying to post my 1600 Ryzen on this Basso board. It turned on all by itself, but within a few seconds the discrete graphics card turned off. Black screen nothing but a cpu fan that eventually ramped up to max; had to unplug the AC power. I had to completely revise expectations on this build after HP cockblocking me, with the excavator-only compatibility of this AM4/B350 board.

In the past I had a nice experience turning an hp "Batgirl" elitedesk fm2+ board into practical bare basics email/www pc. All of these hp matx (elitedesk) boards are somewhat proprietary in that they require a few nonstandard parts. Mainly the HP style power supply, which is actually quite nice as it simplifies cable management; and are very commonly available and cheap on the 2nd hand markets (ebay). The batgirl fm2 build required a proprietary hp cooler. The AM4 Basso board had a 75mm square mounting pattern, so just about any LGA 1155 or similar cooler would do, as long as it came with a backplate.

In any case, the 2nd hand pricing and current availability of the A12 8870 makes this extreme budget board option worthwhile imho for anyone wanting to put together a cheap windows machine. Since these are off lease Windows office machines, these boards come with a Win10 registration already. As long as you know the limited upgrade path and that these require HP style PSU's and a new cooler, this can be really nice as an extra computer in the household.
 
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Insert_Nickname

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For those expecting a cheap AM4 Zen build from these extreme budget 2nd market boards, the best one can hope for is a "poor man's 2200g" build via an A12, [eg A12-8870 which should likely outperform the 2200g graphics wise, with its 8CU high DP capable GCN 1.2 iGPU].

All pre-Polaris GCN has been put out to pasture driver wise, so there may be spotty compatibility going forward on those APUs.

It's not the end of the world, just something to keep in mind.
 
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amd6502

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All pre-Polaris GCN has been put out to pasture driver wise, so there may be spotty compatibility going forward on those APUs.

It's not the end of the world, just something to keep in mind.

I wonder if linux kernel maintainers would patch any serious (security) issues should some flaw be found in the future. (Or whether microsoft even might. I do think these boards support tpm2, so Win11 for the long term might be possible on these. )
 

DAPUNISHER

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The HP Pavilion gaming PC I recently had, was locked to a few AM4 APUs and CPUs too. The cooler is indeed Intel mounts, but the backplate is glued or riveted on. Not worth the time or hassle to get it off. I used standard M2 screws which allowed a Noctua cooler to be installed.

I have the FX 8350 on the test bench right now. Paired with a GTX 1650 super. And a big thanks to @VirtualLarry, he sent me Viper 16GB DDR3 1866 ram kits to test with. Hopefully they will hit 2133 or 2400 stable without loosening the timings.
 

moinmoin

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I wonder if linux kernel maintainers would patch any serious (security) issues should some flaw be found in the future. (Or whether microsoft even might. I do think these boards support tpm2, so Win11 for the long term might be possible on these. )
The Linux drivers are still officially supported, just the Windows ones' ended. AMDGPU covers all of GCN, see also my previous post in this thread.
 
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VirtualLarry

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I have the FX 8350 on the test bench right now. Paired with a GTX 1650 super. And a big thanks to @VirtualLarry, he sent me Viper 16GB DDR3 1866 ram kits to test with. Hopefully they will hit 2133 or 2400 stable without loosening the timings.
I debated posting this, and revealing the secret. I did tell you that RAM was V-Color. I just shoved it inside Patriot Viper DDR3 boxes. Sorry. :p

(That's not to say that it's bad RAM, or that it won't overclock. I'm curious as to your results. It is rated 1866 @ 1.5V, not 1.65V, so it should, in theory, be a higher grade of RAM.)

Edit: NB. I *think* that I used the Viper RAM for some projects, but by any chance if I still have it laying around, and I find it, I'll ship it to you too.
 

DAPUNISHER

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I debated posting this, and revealing the secret. I did tell you that RAM was V-Color. I just shoved it inside Patriot Viper DDR3 boxes. Sorry. :p

(That's not to say that it's bad RAM, or that it won't overclock. I'm curious as to your results. It is rated 1866 @ 1.5V, not 1.65V, so it should, in theory, be a higher grade of RAM.)

Edit: NB. I *think* that I used the Viper RAM for some projects, but by any chance if I still have it laying around, and I find it, I'll ship it to you too.
LOL the V on the heat spreaders completed the illusion. :D That explains why they were not in the holders too. And Yup, I now have a kit running XMP, and it is V-Color and 1.5v. I only had a 2x4 kit of ripjaws 1866 so the extra capacity is great. Thanks again. :beercheers:
 
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amd6502

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The HP Pavilion gaming PC I recently had, was locked to a few AM4 APUs and CPUs too. The cooler is indeed Intel mounts, but the backplate is glued or riveted on. Not worth the time or hassle to get it off. I used standard M2 screws which allowed a Noctua cooler to be installed.

The board for the EliteDesk (Basso) didn't come with any backplate, but the solution was simple and cheap. I got a pretty cheap but good standard intel 75mm spacing cooler (PWM upgraded version of the Thermaltake Gravity i2 ) that came with the plastic backplate and I'm now running cold with solution (under 32C at full load---see pic).

The A12-8870 really went without a hitch and it's been performing quite well for a few weeks. Before installing it on the HP Basso board I tried to POST the A12 on my Asus B450 board---that board didn't even try to power on the CPU fan. So it seems that these HP boards are the way to go for those trying to get some obscure model of Bristol Ridge or Carrizo running.

I also tested single channel vs dual/hybrid (8gb+4gb) channel, and on single channel the scaling going from the A6-9500 to the A12 was poor. With dual channel and somewhat lower latency timings, I'm quite happy with the scaling. It handles quite a bit of multitasking very well.
 

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DAPUNISHER

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I used a few of these MSI A320 MAX boards for builds; it will work great with that A12 and no weird power connectors to deal with.

A320 MAX on Newegg
 

Insert_Nickname

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The A12-8870 really went without a hitch and it's been performing quite well for a few weeks. Before installing it on the HP Basso board I tried to POST the A12 on my Asus B450 board---that board didn't even try to power on the CPU fan. So it seems that these HP boards are the way to go for those trying to get some obscure model of Bristol Ridge or Carrizo running.

I wouldn't expect any retail AM4 board to work with the 8870. It's Carrizo not Bristol Ridge, so I don't think the microcode is even included on any (non-custom) boards.

For Bristol Ridge, A320 boards are your best bet, otherwise quite a few B450s also lists support for BR. But of course, I don't think BR is worth bothering about in anything new. I still have an Athlon 845-based system in use by a family member, but it's getting very long in the tooth.
 

Shivansps

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I tested A12-9800 and they cant come close to the 2200G in GPU or in anything really... in fact they are barelly faster than the 3000G Vega 3. And there are two simple reasons for it, one you cant set the memory over DDR4-2400, no matter what, and two the CPU is terrible slow. Not to mention they only work on 300 series boards and you lose the NVME support.

I dont understand why the A12-8800E, Carrizo or not, would be any better.
 

DAPUNISHER

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I tested A12-9800 and they cant come close to the 2200G in GPU or in anything really... in fact they are barelly faster than the 3000G Vega 3. And there are two simple reasons for it, one you cant set the memory over DDR4-2400, no matter what, and two the CPU is terrible slow. Not to mention they only work on 300 series boards and you lose the NVME support.

I dont understand why the A12-8800E, Carrizo or not, would be any better.
Yeah, unless you're getting the board and APU for practically nothing, it makes no sense to choose it over the Zen based APUs, that enjoy full driver support.

That said, it would still be serviceable for basic stuff, and older or light weight gaming, on win or linux. If it is what I had, I'd do fine with it.

BTW, can you overclock the CPU and/or iGPU via UEFI or software on those A12s? That was what made a $50 3000g on a $53 MSI A320 MAX such a great value.10 percent+ OC on CPU, up to 40 percent OC Vega, and $55 for 2x8GB 3200 when I built it. I'd set out to test it with games, and end up playing for hours because I forgot I was testing, and was having fun.

The FX8350 I am about to try with 4x8GB 1866. Seems like it is best balanced with a 1650 super, of the GPUs I have. I could definitely use this as a daily driver ,even after all these years. The more I use it, the more the old meme rings true - Haters gonna hate. But my experience reflects another meme - The FX 8350 keeps on keeping on. :D
 

Insert_Nickname

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Not to mention they only work on 300 series boards and you lose the NVME support.

Don't you mean that you loose some PCIe lanes? NVMe work just fine with both Carrizo and Bristol Ridge. Provided there is board support, but that's only required for booting.

Otherwise, I have an Athlon 845 which shouldn't be working. I'm sure I'd have noticed...
 

Shivansps

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Don't you mean that you loose some PCIe lanes? NVMe work just fine with both Carrizo and Bristol Ridge. Provided there is board support, but that's only required for booting.

Otherwise, I have an Athlon 845 which shouldn't be working. I'm sure I'd have noticed...

BR does not have the extra 4 pcie lanes intended for the M.2 slot that Ryzen based SoCs have, not sure about Carrizo. So on boards like the Asus A320M-K you can only use sata SSDs on the M.2 with Bristol Ridge.

Unless there is some board that is wired diferently... using an pci-e to m.2 adapter or some 300 board with 2 M.2 were the 2nd is wired to the chipset.
 

Shivansps

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BTW, can you overclock the CPU and/or iGPU via UEFI or software on those A12s? That was what made a $50 3000g on a $53 MSI A320 MAX such a great value.10 percent+ OC on CPU, up to 40 percent OC Vega, and $55 for 2x8GB 3200 when I built it. I'd set out to test it with games, and end up playing for hours because I forgot I was testing, and was having fun.

You cant overclock on A320 chipset, the bios options are still there it might seem as if it working, but they do not apply any changes. BR is no exception. Unless:
1) The "A320" board have a B350 or X370 chipset, there is actually a few of these around. Like the Gigabyte A320M-S2H V2.
2) The 3000G is an exception to this rule and i dont know about it.

As for overcloking BR, motherboards hide a lot of options when you put a BR SoC, i havent seem one that allowed for IGP oc on BR, but CPU oc is certanly possible (with B350/X370 chipset).
 

amd6502

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I tested A12-9800 and they cant come close to the 2200G in GPU or in anything really... in fact they are barelly faster than the 3000G Vega 3. And there are two simple reasons for it, one you cant set the memory over DDR4-2400, no matter what, and two the CPU is terrible slow. Not to mention they only work on 300 series boards and you lose the NVME support.

I dont understand why the A12-8800E, Carrizo or not, would be any better.

The 8800E is 35W TDP; meant for SFF, near silent builds, high perf/watt micro servers. Should do well for a general purpose box too. For 720p gaming it's too gimped by the power budget.

As far as 65W APUs, both the 2200G and the A12's have 8 CU / 512 SPs and can run at around 1.1GHz. The advantage is mostly for the 2200g because it's not bandwidth starved (niche exception being the good Double Precision performance on BR/Carrizo) and more modern Vega=GCN 1.4 architecture. The A12 is a little bandwidth starved at 2400MHz dual channel unless the GPU is throttled down a litte as would happen when both the CPU and GPU compete for the 65W TDP power budget. On single channel 2400 memory setup it would indeed be comparable to a 3000G's 3CU Vega.

The CPU performance is also very sensitive to memory quality, particularly the latency time. It really prefers low CAS numbers because these older APUs have no L3, and the dozer memory controller is already stretched to its limits.

The salvaged Hp board came with an A6-9500 (cost was similar to cost of a windows license: just under $25) and I had the A6 dual core running on single channel 1x 8GB 3200 memory clocked down to the board's limit of 2400. For a bare basics web browsing system the A6 performed acceptably until exceeding somewhat over a dozen tabs split among two browsers (Edge, and single threading Palemoon); so for anything under light multitasking it was decent. I kept this memory setup to test initially when I dropped in the A12, and noticed the scaling was poor (it would still lag with moderate multitasking). After upgrading the memory to dual channel and modules with 2400 MHz timings, the scaling was noticeably improved.

Shivan you're right that there is almost no reason to go with an A12 over the 2200G other than availability, or a dirt cheap price. (Unfortunately it seems almost all 12nm production was ended---I've lamented and complained about this many times! Hence availability of some very good products... eg, 3400g and its siblings, RX-590, RX 560, etc... are all based on vanishing stockpiles, plus 2nd hand markets. So in these lousy times there's still a place for cheap recycled stock of A-series quadcores at the right discount.

Recently I also finished my 1600 Ryzen build with a proper AM4 board, and yeah, the CPU uplift compared to the A12 is shockingly big and was a nice surprise!! and, I'm running the Ryzen on single channel with the single 8GB 3200 DDR4 module---the L3 is so good it hides my cheap memory setup.
 
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Shivansps

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The IGP on the 9500 is already faster than Vega 3, but the 9500 cant take advantage of it due to bad CPU cores, the 9700 and 9800 are indeed noticible faster than Vega 3 but only on games that arent CPU limited, the 3000G is faster in CS:GO for example. The CPU perf and memory limit brings it down.

The long and short of it is that i would go with a 3000G any day rather than the A12-9800, the 3000G is faster in CPU, you can notice that by just using windows, and you can catch up with the IGP perf doing IGP/MEM OC. The 9800 may be a good option with CPU OC, but you are unlikely to find a board that can do that, and power consumption is going to skyrocket.

Not to mention you can use the 3000G on any board. (this is also true for Picasso and Raven APUs, i havent found a 500 board were they wouldnt work yet) it is not listed officially but they work.
 
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DAPUNISHER

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[JayzTwoCents] does a re-visit of the FX-6100, paired up with a vanilla GTX 1660.
I enjoyed the video. Good to see one of the big tech tubers that doesn't bash FX. I also like that he played reasonable games with it, and judged it on its own merits.

However, 8 series CPUs, and FX boards have been stupidly overpriced for years now. While it is nice to see FX getting some love, it makes zero sense to build one if value is a factor.
 

DAPUNISHER

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A guy on Reddit is benching the king of the BD arch, the FX 9590. Hurry! He's taking requests.
Thanks for the link, really enjoying the comments. Cool how many in that thread, are still on FX or only recently upgraded. Particularly relate to the comment about how some of the Assassin's Creed games will crush it. Even a Ryzen 2600 with 3200 cl16 was not buttery smooth in Odyssey at times. Took a 3600 to get there. But hey, you don't have to disable the E cores to play it. :p

I agree with the comment about using it normally; that's what I do. Not going to sacrifice settings and res I would not normally play at. I am almost exclusively a single player gamer, and 1440p with Async, using custom settings with a 2070 Super, is what it has to do to pass muster. The games it can't do it in? Well, let's just say that losers club is rather large, and includes Intel and AMD CPUs newer than it.
 

NostaSeronx

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I have an FX thread if you guys want to help me beat that dead horse. :D This isn't the place for it though.
Instead of replying in that thread, I'll reply in this exact thread.
Their superior per-core performance meant that even two Piledriver "cores" could only match a HTed Bridge core with two threads.
The issue is that the Piledriver cores within a module are Cores. Rather, than being Clusters they are Cores.

SMT2 in general equals a Monolithic processor with a single monolithic execution core that specifically has under-utilized units across workloads.
CMT2 in general equals a Clustered processor with two clusters of an execution core that specifically has an under-utilized cluster across workloads.

SMT and CMT basically are indistinguishable, they both are for increasing utilization in a processor. CMT is however built off that monolithic execution cores increase power non-linearly, and clustered execution cores increase power linearly.

alpha21264.jpg
So, rather than the SMT4-Alpha 21464. A hypothetical CMT2 Alpha 21464 would most likely retain two clusters but each cluster would had MVI/PLZ/MUL, + another Add/Logic, + another Load/Store, plus etc. In this case, majority of the legacy workload could be run on a single cluster. Thus, it would be more efficient to add another thread to the other cluster, so two tuned legacy workloads could run at the same time. While, people eventually figure out how to maximize IPC/ILP in new workloads later.

These are AMD's clustered architecture implementations:
1998-AMD under K8
cmt-k8.png

2003-AMD under K9
cmt-k9.png

By 2007, the build up of the clustered architecture was basically ruined. Instead of adding CMT2 to a clustered architecture, they chose to implement a simplified-exotic CMP2 module instead.
 
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Shmee

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Are the Phenom II X6's still pretty good? To my understanding, at least in the past, they actually did a bit better than their successors, the Bulldozer CPUs.