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AMD Piledriver FX-8 Eight Core 8320 Black Edition

Rannoch

Rannoch

Rannoch

Soldato
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I have been offered this cpu for £80 2nd hand.

Are they good overclockers? If so, what cheapish motherboard and cooler would you guys recommend? Does anyone know what kind of performance they produce overclocked?

Cheers
 
They do overclock well, typically up to 4.5-4.8GHz on a good air cooler (£30 or so). Anything higher than that is probably looking at water cooling.

Cheap boards don't handle them well, especially overclocked. The cheapest I'd get would be the Gigabyte 990XA or Asus M5A97 EVO 2, both £89 at ocuk.

Performance depends on the software. Multithreaded tasks using all 8 cores give excellent performance for the cost, while software that only uses 1-2 cores (like older games), pretty poor compared to current Intel CPUs.

These two benchmarks of the same software illustrate well how performance is very good with multithreading vs software not optimised for multicore CPUs:

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph6396/51135.png

http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph6396/51136.png
 
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They are decent clockers but i wouldn't use it on anything cheaper than the motherboards mentioned in the above post since they draw a fair amount of power and put the VRMs through quite a bit of stress.
 
I didn't say that simply having more cores will make applications faster, but that applications that only make use of 1-2 cores will perform considerably worse than equivalent ones that can use all 8.
 
Not even the 8350 is happy going above the 4.5-4.6 ghz on air on a solid motherboard. just look at the new 4,7ghz with a boost to 5ghz needing a wooping 1,5volts to pulll it off and thats highly selected/binned pieces. You dont want to pull 1.5volts through your piledriver on air. I dont care how good your aircooler is you are going to have a problem when you are stress testing to see if its stable which you will need to do unless you like to play games that will bluescreen until you somehow magicly find the right settings.

That said the 8320 is a solid cpu and should serve you well performance wise.
 
OC performance obviously varies - the Vortez 8350 review had 5GHz stable on a Noctua air cooler. Lots of people get to 4.7GHz on air, higher than that is rare.
 
teppic said:
OC performance obviously varies - the Vortez 8350 review had 5GHz stable on a Noctua air cooler. Lots of people get to 4.7GHz on air, higher than that is rare.
Click to expand...

To say they had 5Ghz stable is a bit of a stretch.
None of the reviews showed the chips under heavy loads.
 
That review said, "So, the clock speed was knocked back enough until it was finally stable enough to complete benchmarks. A final and stable overclocked speed which was usable was 5040MHz. Anything higher and it would occasionally throw a wobbly which meant that our results would be unreliable. At 5040MHz, it was able to complete our entire benchmark suite without freezing up or rebooting itself once which is what we are after." That doesn't sound a bit of a stretch. Not prime95 testing, no (though it includes AIDA64), but benchmarks are stress testers.
 
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teppic said:
Not prime95 testing, no (though it includes AIDA64), but benchmarks are stress testers.
Click to expand...

I dont mean to be rude here but just NO.. Benchmarks should not and usually never will be used for stress testing. Why? because the load will shift to much and they are to short. A stress test is what the term suggests constant 100%/maximum load and no benchmark will ever do that fully. Don't get me wrong, i dont mean that prime95 is the only way to go, there are other stress testing software out there that will do the job.

teppic said:
That review said, "So, the clock speed was knocked back enough until it was finally stable enough to complete benchmarks. A final and stable overclocked speed which was usable was 5040MHz. Anything higher and it would occasionally throw a wobbly which meant that our results would be unreliable. At 5040MHz, it was able to complete our entire benchmark suite without freezing up or rebooting itself once which is what we are after."
Click to expand...

The chip they tested was to the best of my knowledge a sample from AMD as it usually is for the bigger review sites meaning they got a review sample instead of buying one straight from the store which leads to the possibility that it has been carefully selected. Most people who buy a 8350 or 8320 cant get it to 5,0ghz on air no matter how fancy the cooler is. The heat is just to much not to mention the fact that you would need a very good motherboard with quality vrms and cooling on those as well.

Let me give you an example. I have the asus sabertooth fx990 Rev 2.0 board. Regarded as one of the better or even best OC boards for the piledriver chip most likely only beaten by the more expensive ROG. At 4,4ghz i have to feed it 1,40v, LLC set to High, after 5-10 minutes of prime95 the vrms are sitting at a toasty 75 degrees without extra cooling. This is all in an open bench setup, imagen the toastyness in a closed case.

Then there is the amount of extra power consumed when you OC a piledriver, its one thirsty thing but ofcourse not everyone cares about that so we will leave the obvious out of the way.

To recap, you are lucky if you hit 4,7ghz on air and if you hit 5,0ghz on air you might as well take up gambling as a new career path.
 
To most people, being able to run lots of benchmarks suites (testing different aspects of the CPU and system) and 4 game benchmarks without a problem would indicate stability. It doesn't guarantee it, but there's a limit to what any review is going to do.

Lots of people run the 8320/8350s successfully on air at over 4.5GHz with never a problem -- 4.7GHz is not at all rare. I helped someone out with a spec recently who managed 4.8GHz stable in all gaming on a plain Asus 970 board.

I would never expect to get one that does 5GHz on air, but it's possible. Prime95 is falling out of favour as a stability test because of the heat it generates, in a way that no game or regular CPU intensive application would do.

I personally would stop at about 4.7GHz because of the power/heat etc. for a relatively small increase in performance. I'd say 4.5GHz would be the aim, and anything above that is a bonus.

8 pack is doing an FX overclocking guide, it'll be interesting to see his results.
 
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Thing is I can run the benchmarks that the review sites did at 5Ghz on my 8320.
Now why should folks pay loads more money for those cherry chips ?

If they could run under high loads at 5Ghz then maybe just maybe they might be worth the extra to someone.
 
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One cannot say the system is stable until it has been under a torture test meaning 100% load on the part that is being tested for a specific timeframe. Again it doesnt have to be prime95, it can be anything else as long as it causes a 100% load. Its the only way to be sure that some odd program wont crash your pc due to too heavy utilization(been a few games already that has been overheating the CPU due to the way they have been coded, just look up Cryptic studios, their engine use to do this).

Plenty of people claim their 8320/8350 runs stable over 4,6ghz , but they dont explain how they have come to the conclussion. They havent bothered with a proper stability test and even if they have they usually only run it for 10-15 minutes which is not enough(no im not saying 12 hours is needed either). Im not saying that it cannot be done, but its not that common either unless you are using something like a h100 or similar performing cooling solution or your name is 8 pack.

Then there is the 24/7 OC versus the Benchmark OC. What i mean is just because you may actually get the bad boy running at 4,7 doesnt mean its viable for 24/7 use.

Sidenote: The new fx9 series is just stupid.. and i love my 8350. Its a real workhorse spite it drinking a bit to much water from time to time.
 
I'd guess that all the people running their 8320/8350 at 4.6GHz are doing so because it never crashes for them. I can't see people doing it if it means games crashing or bsods.

On my old 2500K overclocked I had instances like Prime95 stable for 4 hours, and yet the Crysis CPU benchmark would crash the game within 2 minutes (and the game in real play would always crash at a random point).
 
I use my 8320 at 4.5Ghz 24/7.
I have no worries about it crashing or overheating at that speed.

However it will run much faster clocks than that for benches and gaming.
I can go up to 5Ghz with high vcore and run most things except stability tests which would be crazy to try as the thermal output and load on the VRM's would be huge.

There is a reason the reviews don't show stability tests as they cannot be passed at the headline clocks they want to publish.
 
I'm looking to upgrade from my x4 965 and get either an 8320 or 8350 but wondering how much performance increase I could expect to see in games that have poor mulitcore optimisation? been playing a lot of beta's recently that only really make use of 1-2 cores and wonder If I'd see much fps increase in those games. maybe worth waiting for steamroller?
 
teppic said:
Which games are only using 1-2 cores? It should only be very old games that do that now.

Maybe get a second hand 8320 and upgrade to Steamroller next year? An 8320 in some recent games would give a huge boost.

e.g. http://www.pcgameshardware.de/screenshots/original/2013/02/Crysis-3-Test-CPUs-VH-720p.png
Click to expand...

well playing firefall currently which is still in beta and pretty far from release and still play a bit of planetside 2 which has crappy core utilisation. those would be the main two I'm thinking of
 
meade16 said:
I have been offered this cpu for £80 2nd hand.

Does anyone know what kind of performance they produce overclocked?

Cheers
Click to expand...

The 8320 at £80 is a bargain, it will exceed the performance of the more expensive i3 and keep up with i5 in many tasks. You should easily see 4500MHz on air if not more. I would look at the M5A99X as a good budget motherboard.

This would give you a mobo/cpu combination for the price of an i5 cpu.
 
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