AMD FX 8320E CPU Review - PAGE 1

Three years ago AMD released the FX 8320 CPU featuring a 3.50 GHz base operating frequency that could go to a turbo mode of 4.00 GHZ for one core, or 3.75 GHZ for all cores, with a Thermal Design Power (TDP) of 125W. Realizing that some users wanted a lower TDP processor with the parameters of the FX 8320, AMD introduced the FX 8320E back in early September 2014. Featuring a 3.20 GHZ base clock, the FX 8320E could reach a 4.00 GHZ turbo mode for one core (3.60 GHZ for all cores) with a TDP of only 95W. This lower TDP allowed users to leverage the FX 8320E processor in small form factor setups or HTPC media centers with a lower cooling requirement.

With the FX processor line also come new instruction sets like Advance Vector Extensions (AVX) to increase parallelism for scientific and 3D applications, Floating-Point Vector Multiply-Accumulate (FMA4) and eXtended Operations (XOP) for improved floating point vector operations, and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) for performance increases on encryption applications. AMD also incorporated the AMD Turbo CORE Technology with performance enhancing technologies to speed up the system whenever an application needs a boost in performance.

Every new AMD FX core processor comes with an overclocking utility through the AMD OverDrive and AMD Catalyst Control Center applications, so the user can configure their own CPU speed.

Today we are going to take the FX 8320E and FX 8320 chips, then toss in the AMD FX 9590 for a round of testing with synthetic, real world and gaming benchmarks. At the end we should be able to determine how well the AMD FX 8320E measures up to the original FX 8320, and how the FX 8320E and FX 8320 might compare with AMD's 5GHz FX 9590.

Here is a recap of the AMD FX 8-core processor lineup to better showcase where our CPUs fall in the spectrum.

AMD FX 8320E Specifications:

Information courtesy of AMD http://www.amd.com/en-us/products/processors/desktop/fx

For this review AMD has provided a motherboard with the latest chipset to support the potential of the AMD FX series processors. Later in this review I will list the additional equipment to make a complete system for testing.

MSI 970 Gaming Specifications:

Information courtesy of MSI http://us.msi.com/product/mb/970-GAMING.html#hero-overview

Closer Look

The AMD FX processor is created as one chip with several components on die. In the two photos below we can see an actual die on the left and an overlay showing a breakdown of the core and cache components of the FX processor next to it. When a core or L2 cache is determined to be defective during production testing, that particular part is disabled to make 2, 4 or 6-core FX processors.

The next two photos show the areas of improvement and enhancements over the previous core and module build.

According to Moore’s Law, which observes that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit like processors will double every two years, AMD should have already introduced a new processor early this year. The following two roadmaps show that the “Piledriver” architecture was introduced in 2013, but the new “Zen” core is not slated to be introduced until some time around the end of this year.