AMD FX8350 BE / Gigabyte HD7970 / ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2 Review

AMD's FX8350 Black Edition is supplied fully unlocked, to cater to the hard core enthusiast audience. There are four processors being launched this week, The FX 4300 is a Quad Core chip clocked at 3.8ghz with a Turbo to 4.0ghz – it has 4MB of L2 cache and 4MB L3 cache.

The FX 6300 is a 6 core chip clocked at 3.5ghz with a turbo to 4.1ghz it has 6MB of L2 cache, and 8MB of Level 3 cache.

The FX 8320 is an 8 core chip with a base clock speed of 3.5ghz and a maximum turbo speed to 4.0ghz. It has 8MB of Level 2 cache and 8MB of Level 3 cache.

AMD are keen to point out that the latest ‘Piledriver' processor has been improved in many key areas. There is a faster instruction exe, Branch Prediction and L2 efficiency improvements as well as an improved HW prefetcher.

The processor we are looking at today is the highest in the respective list.  The base clock is 4.0ghz and it can turbo to up 4.2ghz. The TDP rating is 125W. It is an 8 core design with 8MB of both Level 2 and Level 3 cache.

The FX8350 Black Edition is built on the 32nm engineering process and is based on the AM3+ package. This particular PileDriver chip has 8 cores with memory support from 1333mhz to 1866mhz. We test later with 2,133mhz memory to see if we can push it past the rated specifications.

The FX8350 Black Edition is said to be priced around £150 inc vat, when availability hits UK shores. Currently the FX8150 processor is retailing for around the £140 inc vat mark, so it won't be a hefty price increase for the new chip.

To get a good overview of the platform we will test today with a mixture of synthetic and real world benchmarks, and use some of the latest Direct X 11 games later in the review.

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