Great CPU
review by
wolfwalker
Went from a 955BE@3.8 to a 1090T@4ghz to this 8350@stock in pretty quick order as things happened to work out.
The 955 I ran for several years. They were all fine CPU's for light gaming and any other use heavy or light.
The 1090T was a fair upgrade over the 955 gaining two cores and cooler operation. The cores only
help in software smart enough to use it, and having them there to assign to virtual machines that I use a lot.
The leap to the 8350 was less dramatic, but still worth it considering I sold the 1090T, quickly I might add, for
half of what I paid for the 8350.
At $100 the 8350 was a steal, at $200 I would have been OK with it but a bit less of a deal. I'm sure prices will drop again shortly.
it's a fine CPU, but honestly, we seem to have reached a point that unless one is gaming or really doing a specific task that will USE either
multiple threads or even the ability of a 4ghz CPU, they are all "fast". My 4 core 955 was every bit the CPU this one is in daily use, and the 8350
spends most of it's time loafing along, not really trying very hard. I can't imagine I'll upgrade until programers get there act together and
figure out how to utilize the power we have available now. I went through this fifteen years ago with dual CPU's on my home computer, eventually
software caught up. Intel fairs better gaming, but I believe this is more due to crappy coding than inferior CPU's. Yes the Intel chip processes
what a given game needs faster to make up for the code deficiency, but there are other, just as attractive and heavy games that run perfectly fine on an AMD chip. At much reduced cost.
While it does not alter the situation, it's not the chips fault exactly, and I personally will not reward sloppy coding buy buying an Intel chip just for those games.
Everything else even a "power user" is likely to do, this, and the 6 core before it at 4ghz, does perfectly fine.
This is further evidenced by the fact that a four year old six core chip, the 1090T I had and sold, is in such demand and brings such a
good price so easily still.
My final thought was after two or three years pretty much out of the loop while running my 955, I was very pleased to learn that the new 8 core chips were STILL AM3 socket!
Intel would die before they didn't force one to change board and socket for that much of a change. Or just for the hell of it to extract money from you.
I was a real fan of the Pentium Pro, and ran slot 2 Xeons and P2/3's and Tualatin years ago, but from the netburst crap onward Intel has really rubbed me the wrong way.
So AMD gets my money, and I'm not suffering from it in the least.
Pros | Cons |
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8 cores, 4ghz stock clock, not Intel. | cost? |
Ratings