Overclocking
When we overclocked our FX 8320E, we noted an increase in power consumption based on the meter at the wall of around 100W from the stock load draw of ~200W to the overclocked total system draw of ~300W. The system power draw fluctuated between 293-304W as we hit 4.6GHz for a serious overclock from the rated 3.2/4GHz frequencies. Although the overclock was “Gaming Stable” at 1.44V CPU Core voltage, it took 1.488V to get through the more intensive benchmarks. Obviously we used a multiplier of 23 to get our 4600 MHz, anything above this wasn’t stable but we won’t complain with the result we saw in the end.
We controlled the temperatures with our Noctua NH-D15 and didn’t encounter any issues at stock volts on a PWM controlled thermal curve. Overclocking saw temps rise a little but they were still easily managed by the Noctua beast cooler. The gallery below shows the clock speeds, temps and volts that we saw in our overclocking testing. Although poorly labelled in HWMonitor, the toasty TEMPIND1 looks to be the Northbridge.
Test Setup
Our test bench for the FX 8320E and the usual and ever reliable ASUS Maximus VI Gene Test bench are listed below. It is important to note that the ASUS Maximus test bench is a more expensive platform and for the cost of the board and CPU, it’s expected to perform better – we really wanted to see how close the FX 8320E could get at stock and when overclocked.
AMD FX 8320E Platform | Intel i5-4670K Platform | |
CPU |
FX 8320E |
i5-4670K |
Motherboard | MSI 790 Gaming | ASUS Maximus VI Gene |
CPU Cooler | Noctua NH-D15 | Noctua NH-U14S |
Memory | 16GB Corsair Vengeance Low Profile (4x4GB) | |
Case | Lian Li T60 Pitstop | Node 804 |
Hard Drive |
Seagate Barracuda 750GB & Samsung EVO 250GB SSD |
Seagate Barracuda 750GB & Samsung EVO 250GB SSD |
Power Supply |
Corsair HX 850W |
Fractal Design Integra M 750W |
Graphics Cards |
ASUS R9 285 STRIX |
|
Keyboard | Logitech G910 Orion Spark | |
Audio | Logitech G430 Gaming Headset | |
Mouse | Func M3(rev 2) | |
Network | Direct connection to the cable modem & Shared Gigabit connection via Netgear WNDR3700 |
|
Optical | Samsung USB DVD drive |
Testing Experience
We ran a number of tests to determine the performance strengths and weaknesses of the FX 8320E.
SuperPi
First up we checked single core. We ran SuperPi and calculated Pi to 32M decimal places, then compared the result to our overclocked run and the more expensive but only Intel i5-4670K. It was a little ugly for the FX 8230. After seeing this, we were really interested to see if this gap appeared in gameplay.
SuperPi Test | FX 8320E | FX 8320E @4.6GHz |
i5-4670K |
Time taken (mm:ss) |
23:04.7 | 21:08.4 | 08:27.6 |
CINEBENCH
Main Processor Performance (CPU)
From the CINEBENCH website:
“The test scenario uses all of your system’s processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral “No Keyframes” animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various algorithms to stress all available processor cores.
In fact, CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 256 processor threads. This test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects which in turn contain more than 300,000 polygons in total, and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights, shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is displayed in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor.”
The 8 cores in the FX 8320E appeared to make all the difference here with overclocking having a notable impact as well.
CINEBENCH | FX 8320E | FX 8320E @4.6GHz |
i5-4670K |
Score | 615 | 686 | 552 |
3DMark 11
Although we normally use this for our graphics cards, we wanted to see how the CPUs compared with the same Graphics card in play. The i5-4670K seemed to have an edge in terms of physics which bumped the combined score up for the Intel platform.
3DMark 11 | FX 8320E | FX 8320E @4.6GHz |
i5-4670K |
P SCORE | 9,115 | 9,173 | 9,530 |
Graphics Score | 10,486 | 10,364 | 10,438 |
Physics Score | 6,790 | 7,116 | 7,678 |
Combined Score | 6,214 | 6,425 | 7,390 |
PCMark 8
The PCMark 8 suite is designed to give us a good consistent baseline for home, work and creative workloads in a way that we couldn’t reproduce manually. It’s a great benchmarking set and if you are interested in testing your own system for comparison, please check it out here.
Home Test
The PCMark 8 Home benchmark includes workloads that reflect common tasks for a typical home user. These workloads have low computational requirements making PCMark 8 Home suitable for testing the performance of low-cost tablets, notebooks and desktops. Home includes workloads for web browsing, writing, gaming, photo editing, and video chat. The results are combined to give a PCMark 8 Home score for your system.
Work Test
The PCMark 8 Creative benchmark includes workloads typical of enthusiasts and professionals who work with media and entertainment content. With more demanding requirements than the Home benchmark, this benchmark is suitable for mid-range computer systems. PCMark 8 Creative includes web browsing, photo editing, video editing, group video chat, media transcoding, and gaming workloads.
Creative Test
The PCMark 8 Work benchmark test measures your system’s ability to perform basic office work tasks, such as writing documents, browsing websites, creating spreadsheets and using video chat. The Work benchmark is suitable for measuring the performance of typical office PC systems that lack media capabilities. The results from each workload are combined to give an overall PCMark 8 Work score for your system.
PCMark8 | FX 8320E | FX 8320E @4.6GHz |
i5-4670K |
Home (Conventional) | 3,175 | 3,491 | 4,289 |
Work (Conventional) | 2,889 | 3,201 | 3,770 |
Creative (Conventional) | 3,553 | 3,837 | 3,941 |
Tomb Raider
For the in-game benchmarking utility, the following graphics settings were used
1920×1080, Motion Blur:On, Screen Effects:On, Quality: Ultimate,Texture Quality: Ultra,Texture Filter: Anisotropic 16X, Hair Quality: TRESSFX, Anti-Aliasing: FXAA Shadows: Normal, Shadow Resolution: High, Level of Detail: Ultra, Reflections: High, Depth of Field: Ultra, SSAO: Ultra, Post Processing: On, Tessellation: On, High Precision: On
Although the Max FPS value was higher on the Intel platform, the average for the benchmarks was pretty even at 1920×1080.
Tomb Raider | FX 8320E | FX 8320E @4.6GHz |
i5-4670K |
Min FPS | 40.7 | 40.7 | 40.8 |
Max FPS | 64 | 66 | 72 |
Average FPS | 52.1 | 52.7 | 54.8 |
Batman Arkham City
The settings used for the Arkham City ingame benchmark were:
1920×1080, V-Sync: Off, Anti-Aliasing: FXAA (High), Directx 11 Features: MVSS and HBAO, Dx11 Tessellation: Normal, Detail Level: Very High Dynamic Shadows: Yes, Motion Blur: Yes, Distortion: Yes, Lens Flares: Yes, Light Shafts: Yes, Reflections: Yes, Ambient Occlusion: Yes, Hardware Accelerated PhysX: Normal
The difference here looks to be the physics processing and the ASUS Maximus VI test bench came away with the points in Batman : AC
Batman: Arkham City | FX 8320E | FX 8320E @4.6GHz |
i5-4670K |
Min FPS | 12 | 15 | 18 |
Max FPS | 84 | 93 | 144 |
Average FPS | 32 | 38 | 59 |
Hitman Absolution
The following settings were used in the ingame benchmark:
1920×1080, MSAA:8x, Vsync: Off, Quality Setting: Ultra
Not much to see here as the scores are so close. In this case, the Graphics card looks to be the bottleneck rather than the CPUs.
Hitman Absolution | FX 8320E | FX 8320E @4.6GHz |
i5-4670K |
Min FPS | 4.1 | 4.4 | 9.7 |
Max FPS | 40.7 | 38.83 | 40.78 |
Average FPS | 30.8 | 31 | 32.62 |