AMD Vishera FX8350 Piledriver Review

Test Setup

As AMD are continuing to use the AM3+ socket this is more likely to be an upgrade path rather than the basis for a new system. However, as AMD have provided their top-line CPU we wanted to ensure that we gave it every chance of blowing our socks off and to that end we're using the enthusiast Gigabyte UD7 990FX motherboard, as well as some blazing memory and speedy SSD.  

AMD Piledriver FX8350
Gigabyte GA990FX-UD7
AMD HD7970
Catalyst 12.8 Drivers
Corsair 2666MHz Dominator Platinum
Corsair AX1200W
Corsair H100
Corsair Neutron GTX SSD
Windows 7 Ultimate x64   

Overclocking

As always with AMD overclocking it's a case of finding the fastest available Northbridge and FSB frequency and then balancing the CPU multiplier and FSB until you attain a nice and stable overclock. Starting with the Northbridge we attained 2.6GHz, which is a decent start.

The FSB topped out at a fairly disappointing 275MHz. This will give us enough room to play with though. Leaving the FSB at 200MHz and playing with the multiplier (and some serious vCore) enabled us to attain a 5GHz screenshot, even if the system was so unstable you couldn't do anything with it.

Thankfully there wasn't much tweaking needed to reach a stable overclock, although we are always surprised quite how much voltage is necessary to obtain stability. 4.8GHz is a 600MHz overclock, and exactly the same speed as we generally obtain on all of our Intel CPUs, so we really will be comparing like for like here.