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8350 before AMD goes under?

R

rwdtech

n00b
Joined
Mar 15, 2011
Messages
8
Hey guys,

I have always been a big AMD fan and have always used their processors. I currently have a SABERTOOTH 990FX motherboard with a (now measly) Phenom 965 overclocked to 4.1ghz. I bought the 990fx board with the intention of upgrading to AM3+; this was over a year ago. Finally AMD has come out with a worthwhile AM3+ processor, the 8350, and I need this processor to gain some frames in BF3 (currently I dip to 35fps in some spots despite crossfire 6970's). I am wondering though, with the current state AMD is in, if I should jump on this processor now, or wait until they come out with something slightly better. I remember the 945 was the best back in the day, and it wasn't too long after that they already had a 975. I am worried if I wait too long, AMD will go bankrupt (which is probable) and then the price for the processors will skyrocket due to the supply chain. The last thing I want is to be stuck with this expensive 990FX board and some crummy 965 processor in it. Do you guys think I should drop the $200 on the 8350 now, or wait a while until they come out with a better AM3+?

Thanks!
 
Tough call...I was in a similar situation. If you can't wait until 2014 for Steamroller make the jump. If you can wait, it might be worth it since from my understanding they will be looking to make significant improvements in single threaded performance in Steamroller which is where the FX series is seriously lacking. One word of caution, the FX-8350 is a good jump from the Phenom II 965 but for gaming, the improvements (at stock) aren't exactly earth shattering especially in the older games (http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/697?vs=102). I do see games like BF3 and Far Cry 3 using 6 cores and kind of using the last 2. As for AMD going under, I wouldn't worry about it too much. I believe one there largest shareholders has a boatload of cash and have vested interest in keeping AMD alive.
 
Look, I know that everyone likes looking at benchmarks and saying that it's not great at singlethreaded apps, blah, blah, blah. The really intensive new games are beginning to become multithreaded. Get the 8350, pop it into your motherboard, and enjoy yourself. If you're on the fence about an upgrade then sell the motherboard and go Intel.

Everything runs a lot smoother on my 8120 compared to my nephew's 965 BE. It's like night and day. I wish there were a lot more AMD processor owners for you to get a hands on feel on how it runs. BTW the 8350 is $189 on Amazon.

Make sure you get the flagship processor especially if overclocking. My nephew's 8120 won't OC for anything. So I would spring for the higher quality chip as you'll probably have a better chance at high clocks.
 
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AMD isn't going bankrupt, its going ARM. No doubt to create the unholy trinity of companies with names composing of 3 letters each starting with A.
 
I highly doubt AMD will be going out of business anytime soon.

Get the 8350 and you should be happy with it.
 
I have had my 8320 ( Asus sabertooth 990FX R2) for about 2 weeks. I do a lot of multitasking, and even coming from a 960T running 6 cores @ 3.6-3.7, I notice big improvements with this proc @ 4.3 (1.36V, LLC maintains it to 1.35 under load) in my usage. My situation may be a bit different, as I really want to run a VM or 2, and also game, while maintaining some other background apps. I spent almost as much on my 7950 as I did on the board and processor.

I only want the ability to run 1 core per module, for weekend gaming, which doesn't seem an option in my BIOS.
 
Well I guess I'll go for the 8350 this weekend.

And to say that AMD is not going under, have you been READING THE NEWS? lol, they have laid off tons of employees and engineers. They can't effectively compete with Intel and have/had poor management for a while now, their stock price is incredibly low. Anyone who thinks AMD will not go bankrupt/be restructured/bought out eventually, is in complete denial! I'm not a fan of intel at all, I'm just being realistic.... I'm sure they will be bought or restructured, but there will be a time when they stop making processors until everything gets sorted out. who knows how long that will take tho....
 
rwdtech said:
Well I guess I'll go for the 8350 this weekend.

And to say that AMD is not going under, have you been READING THE NEWS? lol, they have laid off tons of employees and engineers. They can't effectively compete with Intel and have/had poor management for a while now, their stock price is incredibly low. Anyone who thinks AMD will not go bankrupt/be restructured/bought out eventually, is in complete denial! I'm not a fan of intel at all, I'm just being realistic.... I'm sure they will be bought or restructured, but there will be a time when they stop making processors until everything gets sorted out. who knows how long that will take tho....
Click to expand...

I'd be willing to place a wager against this :rolleyes:..
 
Steamroller will be AM3+.

And AMD has been "going under" since the Phenom 1 days. Kinda like how PC gaming has been dying for the last 30 years.

As for the OP, yes a 8350 will be a very nice upgrade over your 965. I went from a 1090 to my 8150 and once I overclocked it, it was a solid upgrade for me. And since Piledriver is 15% faster than Bulldozer, it'll be even better still.
 
I hope AMD gets purchased, this would be a big kick in the insustry's ass. At the moment Intel has the perfect situation: 90%+ market share and a competitor who only has enough money to stay afloat. If a bigger company like IBM purchases AMD, the resulting company would have a much better chance of competing with Intel and lighting a fire under the industry.
 
KazeoHin said:
I hope AMD gets purchased, this would be a big kick in the insustry's ass. At the moment Intel has the perfect situation: 90%+ market share and a competitor who only has enough money to stay afloat. If a bigger company like IBM purchases AMD, the resulting company would have a much better chance of competing with Intel and lighting a fire under the industry.
Click to expand...

AMD, nor VIA, can be outright "purchased" without losing their x86 license IIRC..Intel has the right to refuse to re-license the new company..Now, the interesting question is that since Intel is so large, and has such a huge market share, if AMD/VIA were to be purchased by say IBM, and Intel refused a new license, would the hammer come down on them for having a monopoly at that point?

Intel is already dangerously close to having a monopoly, and that is one reason that they even allow VIA to exist, so they can simply say oh, there are TWO other companies we have licensed x86 to so we aren't at fault we are just so much better..

I would love to see IBM buy a controlling share in AMD, and teach their upper management how to run a successful company..Couple that with IBM's vast array of research abilities and we would most likely see a return of the A64 days, or at least an even playing field..

Writes a letter: Dear Santa,
 
I don't want AMD to be bought, I just want them to be competitive with Intel so we have a competitive CPU market again. Piledriver was a nice big step in that direction but their next step needs to be really big. And it wouldn't hurt if Intel could falter just a little. Unlikely I know but they did it once and with AMD essentially being 1 generation behind, if Intel could stumble a little then maybe AMD could catch up enough. AMD doesn't have to be faster, they just have to be fast enough so that along with some competitive pricing, theyre a viable alternative to Intel.
 
Whatever you spend on AMD cpu now is a money that could be spent better once Haswell is released. And with $2000 you are 20$ short of price point for i5 K version which intel used on last two generations.
 
Michaelius said:
Whatever you spend on AMD cpu now is a money that could be spent better once Haswell is released. And with $2000 you are 20$ short of price point for i5 K version which intel used on last two generations.
Click to expand...

Unless you consider the $250 youd need to spend to get an Intel socket Sabertooth and $100 on a new copy of Windows not to mention having to reinstall Windows again and 8320's are $50 less than 3570K's (don't count Microcenter as 99% of us don't have one anywhere near us).

Going Intel is only best when youre building from scratch or going to be buying a new motherboard anyway. If youre on an existing AM3+ platform especially with a superb motherboard like the Sabertooth or something comparable, there's nothing wrong with sticking with AMD for a little longer unless you've just got the extra $350 to burn.
 
I've been an AMD user since around 1999 and when they went from Phenom to APU I haven't bought anything else from them, because it's all been lacking.

The 8350 is the first thing they have made since that has caught my eye. The only thing that concerns me is the 125W TDP, evidence that the architecture is EOL. I'd say buy it, based on websearches I've done it should be about on par with a fast i5, which is pretty impressive. I think it would make a great multipurpose home server CPU, with all those cores I bet it could handle a few gigabit NIC's worth of traffic
 
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I wish I would've gotten the 8350 instead of the 8150.

Im waiting for the numbers to come in on the next series of processors. Hopefully they make a step in the right direction or intels hold on the market may get alittle stronger.
 
Back on topic, is a 4.x ghz Deneb really THAT slow by today's standards? I build PCs for gaming just about every day for my job, and I see a benifiet with going for an i5 or higher, but not a huge one... For productivity like mentalray or photoshop I can see a huge benifiet, but for gaming, I don't imagine an oc'd phenom II being a total slouch...
 
KazeoHin said:
Back on topic, is a 4.x ghz Deneb really THAT slow by today's standards? I build PCs for gaming just about every day for my job, and I see a benifiet with going for an i5 or higher, but not a huge one... For productivity like mentalray or photoshop I can see a huge benifiet, but for gaming, I don't imagine an oc'd phenom II being a total slouch...
Click to expand...
Short answer, yes, but it depends somewhat on what GPU setup you go with and what games you play.
 
I know games like Crysis, their performance scales nearly linearly with CPU power x clock speed, but i'm running Sleeping Dogs and it runs pretty awesome on my 955 (4.0ghz) and my 6970 (stock). Then again, on my resource monitor sleeping dogs uses all 4 cores well, on less threaded titles, I could imagine an i3 would leave it in the dust, let alone an i5 or i7, so I can see your point.
 
Just ordered one. Amazon has them for $189.99 with free shipping.

I've done my part to keep AMD afloat.
 
im glade i got my brand new 8350 i sent my old one back to newegg got replacement
and i bought the "accident handling" so i have 2 years to get replacment.

i was going to wait hoping CH5 Extreme might be coming out, so i will settle for the CH5Z.
i have been seeing people on other sites going faster than shit with there set up, my experience was very good with my 1st 8350, 5.3ghz this was with my CH4 Extreme board, works very very very well without any tweeking.

i have seen people complain about ther 8350 so much and bad mouth it, i have seen more people happy with screeming speeds.....

i have 890 chipset ram by OCZ i hope it works even better with the 990 chipset, if not i will find the best i can for 990 chipset.
i was waiting for STEAMROLLER but thats too far away, the 8350 with the right board and cooling like i have seems to be what it need to work as good as it gets.
 
The 8350 is a pretty hefty CPU. I'm sure you'll be happy with it for a while. By the time you're looking to upgrade, there will be something new and hot just like the current generation 8350's and i5's are now.
 
Yea, it's a cheap upgrade. My current MoBo is a Gigabyte Ga-990XA-UD3 so all I have to do is drop her in and enjoy.:D
 
hey what ram you guys using on your 990 boards.
if you could get any ram you wanted, what would it be for your 990 boards/8350s

im running some older ram OCZ made for the 890 chipset crosshair4 boards
works DAMM GOOD 2000mhz 24.8.8.8
now looking for better if possible....for 990
 
EagleOne said:
hey what ram you guys using on your 990 boards.
if you could get any ram you wanted, what would it be for your 990 boards/8350s

im running some older ram OCZ made for the 890 chipset crosshair4 boards
works DAMM GOOD 2000mhz 24.8.8.8
now looking for better if possible....for 990
Click to expand...

I run those low voltage samsung sticks. Been really happy with them, and they are half the height of most other ram.

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Elect...6168&sr=1-1&keywords=samsung+low+voltage+ddr3
 
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halcyon419 said:
I've been an AMD user since around 1999 and when they went from Phenom to APU I haven't bought anything else from them, because it's all been lacking.

The 8350 is the first thing they have made since that has caught my eye. The only thing that concerns me is the 125W TDP, evidence that the architecture is EOL. I'd say buy it, based on websearches I've done it should be about on par with a fast i5, which is pretty impressive. I think it would make a great multipurpose home server CPU, with all those cores I bet it could handle a few gigabit NIC's worth of traffic
Click to expand...

The 125watt TDP is BS because it's actually a LOT higher than that...

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2289809
 
Just dropped this bad boy in my system. Great bang for the buck I'd say.

jremoh.png
 
AntiSocialMunky said:
AMD isn't going bankrupt, its going ARM. No doubt to create the unholy trinity of companies with names composing of 3 letters each starting with A.
Click to expand...

Let us just hope they never change the name of the server platforms to Advanced Server Systems or something.
 
Im an intel fanboy but dont hate me i do build alot of amds 4,6 and 8 core machines for people who want to get into pc gaming but dont like the idea of a $400 cpu amd may not benchmark as high as intel and may not perfrom as well as intel but for the average and moderate user/gamer they make a heck of a product at a good price.I dont want to see them go belly up
 
Smashed Ixnay said:
I wonder why you only got 7.8 for the cpu. I got a 7.9 with mine. I know it isn't much of a difference, but just wondering.
Click to expand...

It's actually close to meaningless. I get a 7.8 with an overclocked 3770k which is quite a bit faster than a Phenom X6. There doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason as to what metrics windows uses to determine the score.
 
AMD is not going to just crash over night. You will get plenty of warning, on top of that AMD has lots of important IP and property such as ATI, they will get bought out for that alone. A company this big just does not crash and burn without notice in a week. In fact even if they did go bankrupt what would most likely happen is a they would just move through chapter 11 and come out the same company with no debt, making them even stronger. There are just to many players involved like Germany and various states with fabs that will lobby to give them a good deal, just like GM.
 
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