AMD FX-8350 Vishera 8-Core CPU Review

Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set the memory speed to each platform's highest, officially supported frequency--1866MHz in the case of AMD's newest FX series processors.  The solid state drives in the test systems were then formatted, and Windows 7 Ultimate x64 was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we fully updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, cleared any prefetch and temp data, and ran the tests.

HotHardware's Test Systems Intel and AMD - Head To Head

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2012 Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2012, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2012 suite with Intel's new Core i7 "Ivy Bridge" processor (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, and Cache and Memory). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speed of 4GHz (4.2GHz Turbo) with 8GB of DDR3-1866 RAM running in dual-channel mode on the Asus CrossHair V Formula motherboard.

Processor Arithmetic  AMD FX-8350	Processor Multimedia  AMD FX-8350
Memory Bandwidth  AMD FX-8350	Cache and Memory  AMD FX-8350

SiSoft SANDRA didn't reveal any surprises with the AMD FX-8350. As expected, the FX-8350 proved to be faster than the previous-gen FX-8150 across the board, but it couldn't keep pace with the higher-end Intel Core i5 or Core i7 processors. According to SANDRA, the FX-8350 / 990FX combo put up just shy of 19GB/s in the memory bandwidth benchmark and the Cache and Memory test shows relatively high latency until the data set hits about the 512K mark, where the FX-8350 then becomes more competitive with other platforms.