Concluding Thoughts

Before giving our impression of the Piledriver FX series, let'due south rewind for a infinitesimal and recap what we had learned upwards to this point. When the original Bulldozer-based FX fries landed roughly a year ago, they offered no existent performance advantage over the existing Phenom Ii parts, particularly in our gaming and encoding benchmarks. Likewise, at that place was virtually no improvement made in terms of efficiency, i.e. power consumption.

Fast forward to Trinity's release this calendar month, and the Piledriver-based A10-5800K gave almost the same functioning clock for clock as 2022's A8-3850 Llano APU (not to exist confused with the FX-3850 nosotros're reviewing today). However, the A8-3850 doesn't use Bulldozer cores. It's based on the AMD Family 10h, or as it is normally referred to, the K10 architecture, most popularly employed by the company's Phenom Two processors.

So, from what we knew by comparison Trinity (Piledriver) to Llano (K10), it would've been be safe to presume that the Piledriver-based FX processors wouldn't exist whatsoever faster than their Bulldozer counterparts. Again, if Piledriver Trinity APUs weren't much faster than Llano APUs, which are based on older technology than Bulldozer, it would be odd to expect Piledriver FX CPUs to be much faster than Bulldozer FX CPUs, right?

Unfortunately, that appears to be true. As well WinRAR and Fritz Chess, the FX-8350 was at most 6% faster than the FX-8150 in all of our tests, despite beingness clocked xi% faster (though we should keep in listen that both chips have a max turbo frequency of iv.2GHz). Similar results were seen when comparing the FX-6300 and FX-6100, though the margins were fifty-fifty slimmer here equally the Piledriver chip is just clocked 6% higher.

Honestly, despite what we saw with Trinity, we notwithstanding expected more of the new FX series. Unfortunately, we only had 2 days to test these new processors, which manifestly isn't a lot of time, and much of information technology was spent trying to determine if there was an effect with our exam bed. Notwithstanding, nosotros logged consequent results and accept no reason to dubiousness them, despite AMD'due south press fabric claiming up to 23% more performance.

Granted, "up to" clearly indicates the highest possible speed gain, not the average improvement. With that in listen, we scanned through AMD'south data comparison the FX-8350 to the FX-8150 and we found simply ane exam that showed a large performance gap. Piledriver offered a 21% boost over Bulldozer in 3Dmark Vantage's AI Test. That'southward all the same 2% lower than the supposed maximum gain of 23%, merely it's at least pretty close.

For the heck of information technology, we went a step farther and compiled data from 130 benchmarks run by AMD across 20 different games. The company's ain results show the FX-3850 to be about 5.5% faster than its Bulldozer-based predecessor on average. Despite that relatively minimal improvement, the updated FX series could nevertheless provide some degree of competition if AMD is willing to offering the chips at accordingly low prices.

The new FX-8350 will begin selling at just $200, which is the same price as the Core i5-3470, while the FX-6300 will cost simply $135, considerably cheaper than the most affordable Ivy Bridge Core i5 processor. In fact, it is likewise much cheaper than the almost affordable Sandy Bridge Core i5 flake, the i5-2300, which costs $187. The FX-6300 will cost merely a fraction more than the Core i3-3220 ($130), which was included in this review.

The FX-8350 was 7% faster than the i5-3470 in our synthetic tests, xiii% faster in applications, seven% slower with encoding and iii% slower when gaming. That's ii.v% faster overall. Meanwhile, the FX-6300 was 17% faster than the i3-3220 in constructed benchmarks, 44% in awarding tests, 30% faster in encoding benches and just ii% slower when measuring gaming performance. That'south an average of 22% faster than the i3-3220.

With AMD's aggressive pricing, the updated FX series isn't necessarily in an indefensible position against Ivy Bridge when purely comparing speed and price, simply it's not exactly an open and close example either. The FX-6300 may offer 22% more performance than the i3-3220 for near the same cost, but our Piledriver-powered test rig likewise consumed around 86% more power than the Ivy Bridge automobile (227 watts versus 116 watts).

The bottom line is that the Piledriver FX series provides a quick, affordable upgrade for folks however using lower-terminate K10 hardware, only there isn't a lot to run into for those running high-end Phenom Two X4 and X6 processors, regardless of how cheap the new parts may be. For those building a fresh rig from scratch, Ivy Bridge will probable all the same be more bonny thanks to its superior single thread functioning and efficiency.

Pros: Supported by the existing Socket AM3+ and 9xx series chipsets. Aggressive pricing.

Cons: Minimal improvement over Bulldozer-based FX chips. Not well-nigh as efficient every bit comparable Ivy Bridge fries.