AMD FX-8350 8-Core CPU from 2012 still going strong

# AMD FX 8350: A Retro Processor Review for Modern Gaming (2020)

## Introduction

Welcome to another Friday video! Today, we're diving into a classic processor that has been making waves in the tech community— the AMD FX 8350. Released back in 2012, this 8-core processor was part of AMD's attempt to compete against Intel's Core i5 series. But how does it hold up in 2020? Let's find out.

## Background of the Processor

The AMD FX 8350 is an 8-core CPU from 2012, designed to rival Intel's Core i5 processors. At its launch, it was marketed as a powerful multi-core processor, but it faced criticism for its architecture. Unlike Intel's processors, which had independent cores, the FX 8350 shared resources like the floating-point unit across its four modules. This design led to some controversy.

## Controversy Surrounding the CPU

The FX 8350's architecture was a point of contention. While it had eight cores, these were grouped into four modules with shared resources, which caused performance issues in single-threaded tasks. Intel processors outperformed the FX series in such scenarios. The controversy escalated to a lawsuit, which AMD settled for around $12 million.

## Specifications of the FX 8350

Here are the key specs of the AMD FX 8350:

- **_cores**: 8 cores (4 modules with shared resources)

- **Clock Speed**: 4.2 GHz base clock, up to 4.5 GHz with overclocking

- **Memory Support**: DDR3

- **TDP**: 125 watts

- **Launch Date**: October 2012

- **Price**: $195 at launch

## Overclocking Experience

Overclocking was a crucial part of getting the most out of this processor. The host disabled features like AMD C1E, C6 support, and Cool'n'Quiet to maximize performance. With some tweaking, they managed to reach a stable 4.5 GHz clock speed, running the frontside bus at 250 MHz. The Northbridge frequency was set to 2.25 GHz, and HyperTransport link ran at 2.5 GHz.

## Mainboard Setup

The host used the Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5 mainboard for its SLI support and compatibility with Windows XP. Despite being older, it supported modern Windows 10 perfectly. The board featured:

- **Memory Slots**: 4 DIMM slots

- **PCIe Slots**: Plenty for multiple GPUs

- **SATA Ports**: 8 ports

- **USB Ports**: 2 USB 3.0 and FireWire

## Cooling Solution

To keep the processor cool during overclocking, the host used an IC Graphite thermal pad with a near-silent 125W cooler. This setup proved effective without any need for messy thermal paste.

## DDR3 Memory

The host opted for high-performance DDR3 memory rated at 2000 MHz (133 MHz). The kit purchased from eBay included XMP profiles, making it easy to set up and achieving excellent performance for the system's needs.

## Graphics Card and Storage

For gaming performance, a Radeon RX 5700 with 8GB VRAM was used. This powerful GPU ensured that the CPU wasn't bottlenecked in any game tested. The system also featured a 2TB SSD from Crucial and a Thermaltake 750W PSU.

## Power Consumption

The system's power draw was notable:

- **Idle**: ~123 watts

- **Under Load (Cinebench R20)**: ~213 watts

## Benchmarks

The FX 8350 showed impressive benchmarks, especially in multi-core tasks:

- **Cinebench R15**: Scored 705 points.

- **Cinebench R20**: Achieved 1501 points.

- **Fire Strike**: Overall score of 11,006 with a physics score of 8623.

## Gaming Performance

The host tested a wide range of games at 1080p:

- **Fortnite (DX12)**: Ran smoothly with a 60 FPS cap.

- **Apex Legends**: Maxed settings yielded over 100 FPS, dipping only briefly.

- **MechWarrior 5**: High details ran well at ~100 FPS.

- **Doom (Vulkan API)**: Over 100 FPS in high settings.

- **Strange Brigade (Vulkan API)**: Consistently above 100 FPS.

- **Shadow of the Tomb Raider**: Smooth performance, occasional dips below 60 FPS but still playable.

- **Rise of the Tomb Raider**: Silky smooth at high details.

- **Battalion 1942 (DX11)**: Playable with some dips.

- **Far Cry 5 and New Dawn**: Consistently above 30 FPS with settings capped.

- **F1 2018**: Smooth performance.

## Retro Gaming

The FX 8350 excelled in older titles:

- **Half-Life 2**: Maxed settings yielded over 300 FPS.

- **Dirt 3**: Ultra details ran smoothly at over 100 FPS.

- **Crysis (DX10)**: Playable with some frame drops.

## Verdict

The AMD FX 8350 proved to be a surprise in 2020, handling modern games surprisingly well with the right setup. While it struggles with newer AAA titles that demand single-core performance, it excels in multi-threaded tasks and retro gaming. The host advises investing in good DDR3 memory and mild overclocking for optimal performance.

## Conclusion

The FX 8350's longevity is impressive, offering decent performance years after its release. While modern processors like Intel's Core i5 (2012) struggle more with today's games, the AMD FX series shows better staying power. The host encourages viewers to share their experiences with the FX 8350 and suggests subscribing for more content.

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This article captures the essence of the video, providing a detailed look at the AMD FX 8350's performance in 2020, its specifications, and gaming capabilities.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey guys welcome to another Friday video now this processor has been requested quite frequently it is nothing other than the AMD FX 8350 this is a 8 core CPU from 2012 and back in the day it competed against the Intel Core i5 but what if you still have this processor and you using it in 2020 well this is what we will find out today I had a look at the launch reviews and the conclusion was that in heavily multi-threaded tasks the FX 8350 was quite competitive but in single threaded and lightly multi-threaded tasks the Intel processes were quite a bit faster there's also a bit of controversy surrounding this CPU it is marketed as having eight cores but it has four modules and within each module there are a few shared resources especially the floating-point unit and it all came to a head with a lawsuit and in the end MD settled for around 12 million US dollars so the FX 8350 we have four cpu modules or eight CPU cores we have focus your head space and 4.2 gigahertz to about clock speed this is a black edition CPU so it's fully unlocked it supports ddr3 memory a TDP of 125 watts and it launched in October of 2012 for price of one hundred and ninety five US dollars in the past we did have a look at some FX processors with four and six cores and I got a lot of comments that feel to really get decent performance out of these CPUs you need to overclock especially raising the frontside bus and you also need to get some fast ddr3 memory now overclocking is not something I'm good at I don't do it too often but for this processor there's a huge following out there and I think I would do this processor injustice if I didn't have a good overclocking so I went into the bars and disabled AMD c1e and c6 support as well as virtualization TMD cool and quiet feature and there's also an APM master mode which I've disabled as well in terms of overclocking I wasn't aiming for the moon we've got a 4.5 gigahertz clock speed for the CPU the frontside bus runs at 250 megahertz the Northbridge frequency is 2 point 2 5 gigahertz and the hypertransport link runs at 2.5 gigahertz with the memory running it 2 gigahertz into your channel configuration so the mainboard I ended up using is from gigabyte the 990 FX a ud5 and I initially got this main board because it supports SLI and Windows XP so it was quite handy for some retro SLI adventures but of course it also runs modern Windows 10 perfectly fine we have 43 memory slots a heap of PCI Express slots to install video cards and other peripherals and also 8 SATA ports at the back we have a total of 8 USB to 2 USB 3 we've got firewire eSATA there's an optical audio out ps2 Gigabit Ethernet and also audio ports although we're overclocking a little bit I'm using a stock and d cooler this is the near-silent 125 what md thermal solution and once again we're using the IC graphite thermal pad worked fantastic for this project and just saves me from having to use thermal paste and cleaning up the mess I should get some decent ddr3 memory you guys told me so yep I bought this kit on eBay it's rated at 2,000 133 megahertz it has two XMP profiles and was really easy to set up now a little bit overkill for a machine from 2012 is the Radeon rx 5700 with 8 gigabytes of video memory but I wanted to make sure that we're not bottleneck body video card so we can really see what the CPU is capable of for all the games we're using once again a 2 terabyte SSD from crucial and you've also seen me use this power supply in most of my videos it's a thermo with 750 watts we have some power readings sitting idle on the desktop 123 watts and running Cinebench are 20 we're getting a reading of 213 watts that's the entire system and these figures are a little bit on the high side because of the manual overclock I tested a wide range of games but let's have a look at some benchmarks first in Cinebench r15 we're getting 705 and in Cinebench r20 we're getting 1501 in fire strike we're getting 11,000 653 as an overall score with a physics score of eight thousand six hundred and twenty three and now let's have a look at some games let's start with fortnight and apex legends so fortnight we now running the direct x12 option and look at that it actually runs pretty well in past videos I found that fortnight was having a lot of frame time issues but this is maybe because of the DirectX 12 option or because this processor has so many cause it runs perfectly fine and to get rid of some of the frame time issues just activate a fps cap so here we have the game running at 60fps locked and seems to be running perfectly fine apex legends also runs perfectly fine this is a 1080p with all the details maxed out I'm seeing excellent performance over a hundred FPS at times and sometimes it even hits the 144 FPS cap of the engine first in the beginning when you're dropped down the FPS is a little bit lower but the game is silky smooth and perfectly playable on this machine unlocked onto the Xbox game past and I saw MechWarrior 5 which seems to be a fairly recent game so I've downloaded that we're running at 1080p with mostly high details so if the option gave me how details are selected that and I had everything else enabled and I selected instant action I don't know what I'm doing this game just walking around but we're getting around 100 FPS so that's also very good to see a modern game running well on this CPU now let's have a look at some games that are well optimized using the Vulkan API doom is a little bit older but we can see at high details 1080p it runs well over 100 FPS sometimes hitting the 200 FPS limit of the engine strange Brigade is another game using the Vulkan API we've got high details and also well over 100 FPS so that's another game that is really well playable now voltage line seems to have disappeared from the store from the Xbox pass so I couldn't test that game anymore but we have rage to that game runs at 1080p high details also perfectly playable thanks to the Vulkan API and yeah it's really nice to see all these games running perfectly fine on this old processor shed of the tomb Raider's next 1080p high details we're getting over 60fps most of the time I did see a few areas where it goes over 100 FPS even and sometimes it does dip below 60 but that was not too often so shadow of the Tomb Raider with high details if you have a decent video card will run fine on the FX 8350 a dick try the older game rise of the Tomb Raider 1080p high details silky smooth although this is a scene at the beginning of the game not very demanding but both of these Tomb Raider games should be perfectly playable with this processor just pause for surprised me I know this is a demanding game on the PlayStation 4 for example the framerate can drop really low now this is just the beginning of the game um I've set the details to high and we're getting over 60 fps so yeah I was very surprised seems to be all these threats of the Edco processor do a good job at handling this game but like I said this is only the beginning of the game so it might become a lot more demanding later on I tried Belfield 5 we've dart X 11 option 1080p a high detail this game seems playable but it's not consistently running at 60fps there will be dips below so this is again competitive multiplayer game that I probably would not recommend on the CPU you might be able to tweak the settings a little bit more maybe play with medium or low details and maybe then it will run with more than 60 fps but it definitely runs a lot better on the FX 8350 compared to if you run this game on a Intel Core i5 sorry 8350 definitely has aged better for games such as battlefield 5 far cry 5 is next a game from Ubisoft this game runs better on Intel CPUs that have higher single-threaded performance but it still runs fairly well consistently over 30 fps and there's an option in the game to cap the FPS at 30 so you will get consistent frame times and here we have Far Cry new dawn just under 60 fps we've hide details this is a little bit early in the game there's not much going on here so late in the game performance might be worse but I expect this game also to be consistently above 30fps f1 2018 runs smooth on this machine part details 1080p even at the beginning with all the cows around which is usually the bottleneck with some older CPUs we're getting decent performance in this game and now let's have a look at two older classics first we've got half-life 2 so that's all maxed out with I believe 4x anti-aliasing and 16x and isotropic filtering and we're hitting the 300 FPS limit so retro games perfectly playable on this week I also tested dirt 3 this is always a game I check out at 1080p ultra details for xaa we're getting well over 100 FPS so retro games and all the games you might have a huge steam or GOG catalog with games that you've never played they will run perfectly on the CPU and finally the most important question does it run Crysis here we have the game running at 1080p with very high details I've got this version from GOG because there's no DRM and yeah it doesn't feel a decent job at running again not 60fps locked there are we'll dip below but it's a fairly smooth experience so guys gaming on the FX 8350 in 2020 what is the verdict well the outcome definitely surprised me it did a lot better than I thought it would now could be because we're using faster your free memory and of course we have a half-decent overclock so the advice you gave me is true give this machine good and fast ddr3 memory with lower latencies and overclock by raising the frontside bus and you will extract some decent performance out of the CPU so if you bought such a platform in 2012 and you paid 195 US dollars for TCP you you can still play a lot of games in 2020 and that is really what's amazing about this processor should you invest money in buying such a platform for retro PC gaming I'm not sure they say there's no such thing as a bad processor only a bad price so it boils down to what sort of price you're looking at unfortunately the FX 8350 for some reason the prices on the used market are really high on Aliexpress the one around hundred US dollars which is a lot of money luckily the processor has the latest CPU instructions so modern games will run but $400 you can get a modern horizon CPU from Aliexpress so that's a little bit difficult but if you bought one back in the day and you still got the machine you might still have a few years left maybe some of the most modern games that are open-world will struggle on such a machine but there are a ton of games that will still run perfectly fine so I think this is another example of Md fine wine and an T putting their money on a technology that's more future proof at the time having so many cores didn't make a lot of sense for a lot of applications maybe 3d rendering or video encoding but for gaming definitely at the time it was the wrong move you want it less course but at a higher clock speed but in 2020 things have changed I can definitely tell you if you bought an i5 processor in 2012 you will struggle in more games whereas if you bought the FX 8350 and with a mild overclocking and decent memory you can still hang in there and most games will run perfectly fine on this 8 core CPU from 2012 hopefully I did this processor justice I have listened to your feedback and recommendations and yes I'm convinced this is really a fantastic CPU if borden in 2012 the longevity and future proof nurse is really confirmed it still hangs in there with most modern games so yeah absolutely I can see why this processor has such a following and so many fans out there and hopefully you found this video interesting as always guys leave a comment down below what do you think about the FX 8350 did you buy one in 2012 or did you put money with Intel and as always I do read every comment you might not get a reply but I do read every comment and I pay close attention to feedback and yeah constructive criticism for future videos you never know everything with technology it's not possible and I'll always learn something new from you guys so keep up the comments now give it a like share the video with your friends subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already always something interesting to play around with and that's it thank you so much for watching I shall see you soon with another onehey guys welcome to another Friday video now this processor has been requested quite frequently it is nothing other than the AMD FX 8350 this is a 8 core CPU from 2012 and back in the day it competed against the Intel Core i5 but what if you still have this processor and you using it in 2020 well this is what we will find out today I had a look at the launch reviews and the conclusion was that in heavily multi-threaded tasks the FX 8350 was quite competitive but in single threaded and lightly multi-threaded tasks the Intel processes were quite a bit faster there's also a bit of controversy surrounding this CPU it is marketed as having eight cores but it has four modules and within each module there are a few shared resources especially the floating-point unit and it all came to a head with a lawsuit and in the end MD settled for around 12 million US dollars so the FX 8350 we have four cpu modules or eight CPU cores we have focus your head space and 4.2 gigahertz to about clock speed this is a black edition CPU so it's fully unlocked it supports ddr3 memory a TDP of 125 watts and it launched in October of 2012 for price of one hundred and ninety five US dollars in the past we did have a look at some FX processors with four and six cores and I got a lot of comments that feel to really get decent performance out of these CPUs you need to overclock especially raising the frontside bus and you also need to get some fast ddr3 memory now overclocking is not something I'm good at I don't do it too often but for this processor there's a huge following out there and I think I would do this processor injustice if I didn't have a good overclocking so I went into the bars and disabled AMD c1e and c6 support as well as virtualization TMD cool and quiet feature and there's also an APM master mode which I've disabled as well in terms of overclocking I wasn't aiming for the moon we've got a 4.5 gigahertz clock speed for the CPU the frontside bus runs at 250 megahertz the Northbridge frequency is 2 point 2 5 gigahertz and the hypertransport link runs at 2.5 gigahertz with the memory running it 2 gigahertz into your channel configuration so the mainboard I ended up using is from gigabyte the 990 FX a ud5 and I initially got this main board because it supports SLI and Windows XP so it was quite handy for some retro SLI adventures but of course it also runs modern Windows 10 perfectly fine we have 43 memory slots a heap of PCI Express slots to install video cards and other peripherals and also 8 SATA ports at the back we have a total of 8 USB to 2 USB 3 we've got firewire eSATA there's an optical audio out ps2 Gigabit Ethernet and also audio ports although we're overclocking a little bit I'm using a stock and d cooler this is the near-silent 125 what md thermal solution and once again we're using the IC graphite thermal pad worked fantastic for this project and just saves me from having to use thermal paste and cleaning up the mess I should get some decent ddr3 memory you guys told me so yep I bought this kit on eBay it's rated at 2,000 133 megahertz it has two XMP profiles and was really easy to set up now a little bit overkill for a machine from 2012 is the Radeon rx 5700 with 8 gigabytes of video memory but I wanted to make sure that we're not bottleneck body video card so we can really see what the CPU is capable of for all the games we're using once again a 2 terabyte SSD from crucial and you've also seen me use this power supply in most of my videos it's a thermo with 750 watts we have some power readings sitting idle on the desktop 123 watts and running Cinebench are 20 we're getting a reading of 213 watts that's the entire system and these figures are a little bit on the high side because of the manual overclock I tested a wide range of games but let's have a look at some benchmarks first in Cinebench r15 we're getting 705 and in Cinebench r20 we're getting 1501 in fire strike we're getting 11,000 653 as an overall score with a physics score of eight thousand six hundred and twenty three and now let's have a look at some games let's start with fortnight and apex legends so fortnight we now running the direct x12 option and look at that it actually runs pretty well in past videos I found that fortnight was having a lot of frame time issues but this is maybe because of the DirectX 12 option or because this processor has so many cause it runs perfectly fine and to get rid of some of the frame time issues just activate a fps cap so here we have the game running at 60fps locked and seems to be running perfectly fine apex legends also runs perfectly fine this is a 1080p with all the details maxed out I'm seeing excellent performance over a hundred FPS at times and sometimes it even hits the 144 FPS cap of the engine first in the beginning when you're dropped down the FPS is a little bit lower but the game is silky smooth and perfectly playable on this machine unlocked onto the Xbox game past and I saw MechWarrior 5 which seems to be a fairly recent game so I've downloaded that we're running at 1080p with mostly high details so if the option gave me how details are selected that and I had everything else enabled and I selected instant action I don't know what I'm doing this game just walking around but we're getting around 100 FPS so that's also very good to see a modern game running well on this CPU now let's have a look at some games that are well optimized using the Vulkan API doom is a little bit older but we can see at high details 1080p it runs well over 100 FPS sometimes hitting the 200 FPS limit of the engine strange Brigade is another game using the Vulkan API we've got high details and also well over 100 FPS so that's another game that is really well playable now voltage line seems to have disappeared from the store from the Xbox pass so I couldn't test that game anymore but we have rage to that game runs at 1080p high details also perfectly playable thanks to the Vulkan API and yeah it's really nice to see all these games running perfectly fine on this old processor shed of the tomb Raider's next 1080p high details we're getting over 60fps most of the time I did see a few areas where it goes over 100 FPS even and sometimes it does dip below 60 but that was not too often so shadow of the Tomb Raider with high details if you have a decent video card will run fine on the FX 8350 a dick try the older game rise of the Tomb Raider 1080p high details silky smooth although this is a scene at the beginning of the game not very demanding but both of these Tomb Raider games should be perfectly playable with this processor just pause for surprised me I know this is a demanding game on the PlayStation 4 for example the framerate can drop really low now this is just the beginning of the game um I've set the details to high and we're getting over 60 fps so yeah I was very surprised seems to be all these threats of the Edco processor do a good job at handling this game but like I said this is only the beginning of the game so it might become a lot more demanding later on I tried Belfield 5 we've dart X 11 option 1080p a high detail this game seems playable but it's not consistently running at 60fps there will be dips below so this is again competitive multiplayer game that I probably would not recommend on the CPU you might be able to tweak the settings a little bit more maybe play with medium or low details and maybe then it will run with more than 60 fps but it definitely runs a lot better on the FX 8350 compared to if you run this game on a Intel Core i5 sorry 8350 definitely has aged better for games such as battlefield 5 far cry 5 is next a game from Ubisoft this game runs better on Intel CPUs that have higher single-threaded performance but it still runs fairly well consistently over 30 fps and there's an option in the game to cap the FPS at 30 so you will get consistent frame times and here we have Far Cry new dawn just under 60 fps we've hide details this is a little bit early in the game there's not much going on here so late in the game performance might be worse but I expect this game also to be consistently above 30fps f1 2018 runs smooth on this machine part details 1080p even at the beginning with all the cows around which is usually the bottleneck with some older CPUs we're getting decent performance in this game and now let's have a look at two older classics first we've got half-life 2 so that's all maxed out with I believe 4x anti-aliasing and 16x and isotropic filtering and we're hitting the 300 FPS limit so retro games perfectly playable on this week I also tested dirt 3 this is always a game I check out at 1080p ultra details for xaa we're getting well over 100 FPS so retro games and all the games you might have a huge steam or GOG catalog with games that you've never played they will run perfectly on the CPU and finally the most important question does it run Crysis here we have the game running at 1080p with very high details I've got this version from GOG because there's no DRM and yeah it doesn't feel a decent job at running again not 60fps locked there are we'll dip below but it's a fairly smooth experience so guys gaming on the FX 8350 in 2020 what is the verdict well the outcome definitely surprised me it did a lot better than I thought it would now could be because we're using faster your free memory and of course we have a half-decent overclock so the advice you gave me is true give this machine good and fast ddr3 memory with lower latencies and overclock by raising the frontside bus and you will extract some decent performance out of the CPU so if you bought such a platform in 2012 and you paid 195 US dollars for TCP you you can still play a lot of games in 2020 and that is really what's amazing about this processor should you invest money in buying such a platform for retro PC gaming I'm not sure they say there's no such thing as a bad processor only a bad price so it boils down to what sort of price you're looking at unfortunately the FX 8350 for some reason the prices on the used market are really high on Aliexpress the one around hundred US dollars which is a lot of money luckily the processor has the latest CPU instructions so modern games will run but $400 you can get a modern horizon CPU from Aliexpress so that's a little bit difficult but if you bought one back in the day and you still got the machine you might still have a few years left maybe some of the most modern games that are open-world will struggle on such a machine but there are a ton of games that will still run perfectly fine so I think this is another example of Md fine wine and an T putting their money on a technology that's more future proof at the time having so many cores didn't make a lot of sense for a lot of applications maybe 3d rendering or video encoding but for gaming definitely at the time it was the wrong move you want it less course but at a higher clock speed but in 2020 things have changed I can definitely tell you if you bought an i5 processor in 2012 you will struggle in more games whereas if you bought the FX 8350 and with a mild overclocking and decent memory you can still hang in there and most games will run perfectly fine on this 8 core CPU from 2012 hopefully I did this processor justice I have listened to your feedback and recommendations and yes I'm convinced this is really a fantastic CPU if borden in 2012 the longevity and future proof nurse is really confirmed it still hangs in there with most modern games so yeah absolutely I can see why this processor has such a following and so many fans out there and hopefully you found this video interesting as always guys leave a comment down below what do you think about the FX 8350 did you buy one in 2012 or did you put money with Intel and as always I do read every comment you might not get a reply but I do read every comment and I pay close attention to feedback and yeah constructive criticism for future videos you never know everything with technology it's not possible and I'll always learn something new from you guys so keep up the comments now give it a like share the video with your friends subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already always something interesting to play around with and that's it thank you so much for watching I shall see you soon with another one\n"