AMD FX processors often get laughed at as AMD’s “Netburst moment” based on their inferior performance and efficiency compared to the competition from Intel. But unlike Intel’s Netburst abomination, AMD usually gives you better performance per dollar. While Intel was busy trying to shove Rambus memory down the industry’s throat and kill off the Pentium 3 so it stops embarrassing their lackluster Pentium 4, AMD’s Athlon processors were offering better performance than Intel, and for less money than Intel’s pricing.

The other trend is that failures of AMD’s first generation products tend to tarnish the reputation of the improved follow-up product generations. The AMD Phenom from 2008 was a disappointment, but a year later the Phenom II was improved enough to become a competitive product, even if not winning the performance crown. A similar situation occurred in 2011 with AMD’s FX Bulldozer processor, which quickly gained notoriety for running hot and hungry while being slower than competing Intel products. But a year later, once again AMD released an improved second generation of FX processors, which not only cost less than Intel’s but actually became competitive under the right workloads. Those workloads were ones that relied on many threads. Unfortunately for AMD, 3D games at the time did not fall in the same workload category. The other major difference is that while Intel forced more product segmentation by either disabling overclocking or other features, AMD FX processors were unlocked and didn’t suffer from silly forced feature reduction.

Fast forward to 2018, and games regularly use 4 or more threads. A locked down 4-core 4-thread Intel from 2012 is no longer looking like a smart choice compared to AMD’s 8-thread unlocked processor, especially for the enthusiast on a budget, willing to get more performance from overclocking.

In this video we explore AMD FX 8350 performance in modern games.