Reviewed : AMD FX 8320E CPU

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 

superpi

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

CINEBENCH

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

3dmark11

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

PCMark8-2

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

tombraider

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

batman

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

hitman

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