AMD FX-8370E AM3+ Processor Performance Review

By Hank Tolman

Manufacturer: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Product Name: AMD FX-8370; AMD FX-8370E
Model Number: FD837EWMW8KHK
Price As Tested: $199 (MSRP)

Full Disclosure: The product sample used in this article has been provided by AMD.

The newest installment of AMD FX CPUs is finally upon us. September 2014 marks the release of the a few new FX CPUs, including the FX-8370, the FX-8370E, and the FX-8320E. Although I, for one, have been anxious to see a new FX CPU lineup using Steamroller cores, the three CPUs released today follow the same pattern as the last two years worth of FX CPU in using Piledriver cores. With the AMD Kaveri APUs showing up at the beginning of 2014 with Steamroller cores, I thought perhaps the FX series wouldn’t be far behind. Looks like we will be waiting until next year at least. Today, Benchmark Reviews takes a look at the FX-8370 and FX-8370E processors.

Both the FX-8370 and the FX-8370E tout eight Piledriver cores and compete in price with Intel’s i5-4570. AMD really likes the sub-$200 market and we saw just how well they have been able to stack up to the competition in a price/performance ratio with the Kaveri release in early 2014. I’d expect that the FX-8370 and the FX-8370E also compete very well with their similarly prices competitors. Before we jump into a closer look at the FX-8370 and FX-8370E, let’s take a look at AMD’s current FX lineup.

Now let’s look at the new CPUs.

The FX-8370, FX-8370E, and FX-8320E CPUs represent a simple refresh of the FX series. As so often happens when CPU yields become more and more stable, the clock speeds are simply increased and a new CPU is released. The FX-8370 is no different than the FX-8350; it just comes with a higher turbo clock. The FX-8370 sticks with the same 4.0GHz base clock as the FX-8350, but turbos up to 4.3GHz, where the max clock for the FX-8350 is 4.2GHz. Of course, since both of the processors are Black Edition CPUs, it’s pretty likely that a fairly stable FX-8350 would be able to provide the exact same performance as an FX-8370.

The real story behind the new FX series releases is the 8000E series processors that are being released. The FX-8370E and FX-8320E represent a significant drop in TDP to the tune of nearly 25%. The E series FX CPUs have a TDP of 95W, compared to the typical 125W of all the other FX CPUs. To achieve this level of energy efficiency, the base clock on the FX-8370E has been dropped all the way to 3.3GHz. The max clock-speed stays the same as the 125W version at 4.3GHz, however. That fact seems to imply a lot of potential performance from the FX-8370E, especially in single-core applications, while offering a significant amount of energy savings. I can certainly understand the appeal, considering I have watched my electricity bill continue to trend higher over the years even while my usage stays the same.

Unfortunately, the FX-8370E, while it may help save money on electricity, it doesn’t save any upfront. The FX-8370E has an MSRP of $199, just like the fully clocked FX-8370. That would be the way to go, however, if you are interested in lowering the amount of power your system uses, especially because the FX-8370E is really the same CPU as the FX-8370. I was able to overclock the one AMD sent me very stably to 4.3GHz on all cores. I suppose you could underclock the FX-8370 just as easily, turning it into your very own FX-8370E.

With the release of the FX-8370 and FX-8370E, the upper range of AMD FX processors is going through something of a price shift. The previous top end of the FX-8000 series, the FX-8350, will drop in price to $178. The flagship FX-9590 actually experiences the biggest drop in price to an MSRP of $226, an $86 drop. I’ve attached a chart below that shows the FX lineup and their new prices. The model numbers ending in WOX representing a CPU that comes in a box set with a liquid cooling solution.

So how do the new processors stack up? Let’s find out.

While the new AMD FX-8370 and FX-8370E processors compete most closely in price with the i5-4570, the closest competing processor that I had on hand for these tests was the i5-4670. The i5-4670 currently costs $219, about $20 more than the FX-8370 and FX-8370E. Keeping that in mind, I think the benchmarks do a good job of showing how the new AMD FX chips stack up against the competition in the all-important price to performance ratio.

In addition to the results for the Intel i5-4670 processor, I also included scores for the Steamroller based Kaveri A10-7850K APU, which I found to be an excellent value earlier this year. In fact, I liked how the Kaveri APUs stacked up enough to consider writing off the FX series completely. I think I’ll wait to pass judgement, however, until we see something other than a simple CPU refresh. I also included scores for the AMD FX-9590; the top end of the FX series.

The selection of benchmarks is a little limited for a couple of reasons. The first is that I had only 3 days to test the new AMD FX processors, and those days happened to fall over Labor Day weekend 2014. The second is that AMD spent a lot of time in their press release touting the gaming capabilities of the FX series of processors when paired with high-end AMD R9 series graphics cards. Well no duh. Nearly any processor, when paired with an R9 series graphics card, is going to be able to pull off great scores in gaming benchmarks. Since the FX processors don’t have an on-die graphics solution, I see no particular reason to include DX11 synthetic benchmarks or actual game benchmarks in the review.

FM2+ Test System

• Motherboards: ASUS A88X Pro
• Processor: AMD A10-7850K
• System Memory: 8GB AMD Radeon DDR3 2400MHz
• Disk Drive: Seagate 1TB SSHD ST1000LM014
• PSU: Corsair CMPSU-850TX 850W 80-Plus Certified
• Video Card: XFX R9-280X
• Operating System: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Intel Test System

• Motherboard: Biostar HiFi Z87W
• Processor: Intel Core i5-4670
• System Memory: 8GB AMD Radeon DDR3 2400MHz
• Disk Drive: Seagate 1TB SSHD ST1000LM014
• PSU: Corsair CMPSU-850TX 850W 80-Plus Certified
• Video Card: XFX R9-280X
• Operating System: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

AMD 990FX Test System

• Motherboard: ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Killer
• Processors: AMD FX-8370; AMD FX-8370E; AMD FX-9590
• System Memory: 8GB AMD Radeon DDR3 2400MHz
• Disk Drive: Seagate 1TB SSHD ST1000LM014
• PSU: Corsair CMPSU-850TX 850W 80-Plus Certified
• Video Card: XFX R9-280X
• Operating System: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Compute Benchmarks

• AIDA 64
• SiSoftware Sandra 2014
• Cinebench R15

The Queen benchmark is a simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. The Photoworxx benchmark performs common photo and image editing tasks. The Queen benchmark seems to be made specifically for the AMD processors. The scale right up the list, with all of them thrashing the i5-4670; including the A10 APU. The Photoworxx tests bring things back into perspective and show a good estimation of processing that is very common today. In the Photoworxx test, the FX-8370E and the higher clocked FX-8370 both outpace the i5-4670, albeit by much slimmer margins than in the Queen test.

SiSoftware Sandra is a 32- and 64-bit client/server Windows system analyzer that includes benchmarking, testing and listing modules. It tries to go beyond other utilities to show you more of what is really going on under the hood so you draw comparisons at both a high and low-level in a single product. You can get information about the CPU, GPGPU, chipset, video adapter (GPU), ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals even .NET and Java.

The above tests show CPU bandwidth in GB/s for each of the associated tasks. The results of these tests were quite interesting. I would expect to see an increase in bandwidth on par with the increase in clock speed of the AMD processors. That doesn’t appear to be the case, however. I ran the tests over and over again trying to understand why the FX-9590 scores so poorly in the Encryption and Hash tests.

I still am not sure why this is the case, but in any event, the FX-8370E and FX-8370 processors do score quite closely to the Intel i5-4670. It is difficult to pick out a winner here, due to the fluctuations, but they all perform quite closely.

CINEBENCH is a cross-platform testing suite that measures hardware performance and is the de facto standard benchmarking tool for leading companies and trade journals for conducting real-world hardware performance tests. With the new Release 15, systems with up to 256 threads can be tested. CINEBENCH is available for both Windows and OS X and is used by almost all hardware manufacturers and trade journals for comparing CPUs and graphics cards.

PCMark 8 is designed to be an extremely realistic benchmark that takes actual tasks that are commonly used in different environments and testing them, then compiling the results and assigning a score. During the PCMark 8 tests, worksheets and documents are opened, edited, and saved. Music and videos are played. Video conferencing is simulated. An internet browser is opened and runs through a series of pages and requests. The tests cover the gamut of tasks that are commonly associated with home use, work use, and creativity based usage.

One of the advantages that the AMD processors had in this particular test was their ability to use the R9-280X GPU and OpenCL to help out. This is, in part, the very beginnings of what AMD envisions in their heterogeneous compute future. Whether that is the sole reason that the AMD FX-8370 and FX-8370E outpace the i5-4670 in the home and creative suites is up for interpretation. Even with the OpenCL support, the i5 still pulls out a win in the work suite.

IMPORTANT: Although the rating and final score mentioned in this conclusion are made to be as objective as possible, please be advised that every author perceives these factors differently at various points in time. While we each do our best to ensure that all aspects of the product are considered, there are often times unforeseen market conditions and manufacturer changes which occur after publication that could render our rating obsolete. Please do not base any purchase solely on our conclusion, as it represents our product rating specifically for the product tested, which may differ from future versions. Benchmark Reviews begins our conclusion with a short summary for each of the areas that we rate.

AMD has long controlled the value portion of the sub-$200 processor market. Though the FX series is the latest iteration, the Phenom and Phenom-II processors before it also held down an excellent price to performance ratio, demonstrating the viability of AMD processors. The newest refresh of the FX series, the FX-8370E and FX-8370 CPUs show nothing different, especially in multi-threaded performance. The octa-core CPUs easily match or beat the i5-4670 in most benchmarks. Many of those wins are by a large margin when the tests rely heavily on the full 8 threads. I am actually very impressed with the performance of the AMD FX-8370E CPU, which is stock clocked at a mere 3.3GHz. That is quite a bit slower than the 4.0GHz of the FX-8370, but the difference in performance wasn’t anywhere near that 17.5% difference in clock speed. That is likely due to the excellent boosting from the clock 3.3GHz to the max 4.3GHz in necessary situations.

The AMD FX-8370E also very easily overclocked on all cores to 4.3GHZ using the auto-tune feature included in AMD’s overdrive. The FX-8370 gave me a less than stellar performance in this category, only making it to 4.5GHz stably, barely higher than the max 4.3GHz. Of course, that max clock speed is the same for the FX-8370E. In overclocking the FX-8370E and the FX-8370, it makes perfect sense why these two processors are priced exactly the same. The are, in essence, the same CPU, with nothing more than a change in core clock speed and TDP. The two could seemingly be used interchangeably by simply overclocking or underclocking. As for the scores, I’m split on the overclocking, since the 8370E did so well and the 8370 sort of flopped.

The simply fact that AMD can continue to release new versions of the same CPUs with slightly higher clock speeds while lowering prices across the board is a testament to their high level of construction and the quality of materials used. The yields must continue to improve, because we are going on two years of Piledriver based FX chips at this point. The real question that this brings up, of course, is the value of the FX-8370 over the FX-8350. While the FX-8370 only has an MSRP $12 higher than the FX-8350, the two CPUs are made from the same stock. I would bank on the likelihood of buying an FX-8350 CPU and it being able to perform just as well as any FX-8370 CPU. Of course, I’d only be banking $12.

The FX series of processors represents a small part of the huge branding efforts of AMD. You can practically build an entire gaming PC out of parts from AMD or manufacturing partners. In our testbench, the Chipset on the motherboard is made by AMD, as is the CPU, the GPU, and the RAM. You can also get an AMD SSD to go along with the rest, leaving nothing but the PSU up to the another company. This is a testament of the functionality of the FX CPUs. AMD has the ability to fine tune performance together with every other component to ensure an excellent experience across the board. I’ve said the same about Samsung’s completely in-house manufactured SSDs recently. It is true for them, and it is true for AMD.

At the time of this writing, the AMD FX-8370E and FX-8370 processors are both set with an MSRP of $199. We will see what the retailers do with this, but at just under $200, the FX-8370E and FX-8370 represent an excellent value. The performance is certainly on par or exceeding that of the slightly higher priced i5-4670. I would have to say that the best competition in price/performance for the FX-8370E and FX-8370 is actually the FX-8350.

Pros:

Cons:

– The FX-8350 might be a better value
– 2 yr old refreshed CPUs

• Performance: 8.50
• Overclock: 8.00
• Construction: 9.00
• Functionality: 9.00
• Value: 8.00