AMD FX-8350 review

Written by Harry Butler

November 6, 2012 | 11:03

Tags: #piledriver

Companies: #amd

Power Consumption

For all of the performance tests, we disable all power-saving technology in order to give us a consistent set of results, and also best-case performance numbers - even though technologies such as Intel's SpeedStep might only take microseconds to kick in, that can make a difference in some tests.

However, for the power consumption tests we re-enable everything in order to get a real-world power draw. The power draw is measured via a power meter at the wall, so the numbers below are of total system power draw from the mains, not the power consumption of a CPU itself. Measuring the power draw of any individual component in a PC is tricky to impossible to acheive.

Idle Power Consumption

For this test, we leave the PC doing nothing but displaying the Windows 7 desktop (with Aero enabled) for a few minutes and record the wattage drawn from the wall via a power meter.

Power Consumption (Idle)

Windows Aero enabled

  • AMD FX-8350 (4GHz/4.8GHz)
  • Intel Core i5-3570K (3.4GHz/5GHz)
  • Intel Core i7-3770K (3.5GHz/4.8GHz)
  • AMD FX-8120 (3.1GHz/4.65GHz)
  • AMD FX-8150 (3.6GHz/4.818GHz)
  • Intel Core i5-2500K (3.3GHz/5GHz)
  • AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition (3.3GHz/4.2GHz)
  • Intel Core i7-2600K (3.4GHz/5GHz)
  • Intel Core i7-3930K (3.2GHz/4.7GHz)
  • Intel Core i7-990X Extreme Edition (3.46GHz/4.6GHz)
  • Intel Core i7-920 (2.66GHz/4.04GHz)
  • Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition (3.3GHz/4.7GHz)
    • 95
    • 160
    • 97
    • 119
    • 99
    • 115
    • 105
    • 119
    • 110
    • 126
    • 114
    • 131
    • 117
    • 183
    • 118
    • 136
    • 132
    • 200
    • 152
    • 208
    • 158
    • 222
    • 179
    • 210
0
50
100
150
200
250
Watts, lower is better
  • Stock Speed
  • Overclocked

Load Power Consumption

For this test, we want to only stress the CPU, so use the smallfft stress test of Prime95 to fully load all available processors (logical as well as physical). We leave Aero enabled, and wait a few minutes for any power saving technology to kick in and for the power consumption to level out before taking our reading.

Power Consumption (Load)

Windows Aero enabled

  • Intel Core i5-3570K (3.4GHz/5GHz)
  • Intel Core i5-2500K (3.3GHz/5GHz)
  • Intel Core i7-3770K (3.5GHz/4.8GHz)
  • Intel Core i7-2600K (3.4GHz/5GHz)
  • AMD FX-8350 (4GHz/4.8GHz)
  • AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition (3.3GHz/4.2GHz)
  • Intel Core i7-920 (2.66GHz/4.04GHz)
  • AMD FX-8120 (3.1GHz/4.65GHz)
  • AMD FX-8150 (3.6GHz/4.818GHz)
  • Intel Core i7-3930K (3.2GHz/4.7GHz)
  • Intel Core i7-990X Extreme Edition (3.46GHz/4.6GHz)
  • Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition (3.3GHz/4.7GHz)
    • 161
    • 267
    • 162
    • 311
    • 166
    • 244
    • 180
    • 313
    • 213
    • 364
    • 236
    • 498
    • 243
    • 411
    • 242
    • 579
    • 244
    • 586
    • 252
    • 525
    • 263
    • 423
    • 289
    • 538
0
100
200
300
400
500
600
Watts, lower is better
  • Stock Speed
  • Overclocked

Note: the AMD chips were tested in an ATX motherboard, while the Intel LGA1155 chips were tested in a micro-ATX board. This difference can account for up to 20W, as we found in our Energy Efficient Hardware feature.
Discuss this in the forums

Posted by xxxsonic1971 - Tue Nov 06 2012 11:21

I might as well keep my old i7 920 for another couple of years then...

Posted by GuilleAcoustic - Tue Nov 06 2012 11:26

thanks for the review. Not bad considering the price tag and the plateform cost. For pleople running 2007 / 2008 era CPU (like my Q6600), this could be a good upgrade.

But I'm more tempted by an A10-5700 (space issue and low power requirement).

Posted by rollo - Tue Nov 06 2012 11:39

The biggest issue for most who on here might still have the i7920 or some who have the 980 990 chips they have now had those chips for 3-4 years and they are still ahead of amd in every benchmark if they own the later 2. An overclocked i7 920 is still as fast as this at stock ( in most of the tests here) and nobody is going to buy for the sake of it.

For the gaming platform i run i still dont have a reason to upgrade my overclocked i7950 to something faster. my vid and photo edit machine was upgraded already.

Posted by GuilleAcoustic - Tue Nov 06 2012 11:43

Given the signature I see in many profiles here ... a lot of us still use C2D/C2Q CPUs.
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