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GPUs and CPUs

AMD FX

10owners with an opinion
75%of verdicts positive
2/2positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and value; criticized for noise.

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Doesn’t like it
>Mostly now that there is a lot of software that scales across cores better now That's pretty much irrelevant since the AMD's FX arch's issues weren't that SW at the time wasn't using all the 8 cores. Intel dropped the Core 2 Duo and Quad into the era where most SW was still stuck in single threaded for a long time and those CPUs still ripped single-threaded SW tasks regardless. Here's the big reasons why the FX sucked back then and why they still suck today in the multi-thread SW era: Instead of discrete, fully independent cores, AMD grouped processing units into "Modules" where each module contained two integer execution units, but they had to share critical resources like one FPU, the instruction fetch/decode pipeline, and the L2 cache so when both "cores" inside a module were heavily taxed especially with math or physics-heavy calculations (like in videogames), they choked fighting over shared hardware. AMD designed Bulldozer with a very long pipeline, betting they could sacrifice efficiency per clock cycle in exchange for extraordinarily high clock speeds(a-la Intel Pentium 4) but the IPC was so bad that an FX core was often slower clock-for-clock than AMD’s previous-generation Phenom II chips and also their power consumption exploded. FX processors were plagued by high cache latencies and an inefficient memory subsystem as another bottleneck. So yeah, modern multi-threading SW and kernels can't work around all those arch bottlenecks. Performance will sti…
Likes it
AFAIR Steamroller was a big 'correction' of the Shared resource issues in the arch (I can't remember if other revisions had other improvements). AMD was also having to deal with the fact GloFo split off and was relying more on general 'bulk' lithography, which kneecapped them for some time especially due to yield issues on the FX series and overall cost of that deal. Intel also very quickly after, released Sandy Bridge and aggressively scaled it up and down; the 2500K was so cheap yet powerful I know of at least one setup that ran for a decade an only got replaced because they needed to upgrade to windows 11 for compliance-esque reasons. My own 2500K I replaced in 2017-2018-ish, only because either the motherboard took an unfortunate dive and it was easier to replace both at once. FWIW, I did do a cheapie FX build in 2015ish for my then-girlfriend as a DVR and light gaming/emulation 'under the TV box', and it did the job well for the price, but it definitely wasn't anything amazing. It was a tough time for AMD for sure. I think the 'split' between the Cat cores (Bobcat/Jaguar) also hurt them from a resource standpoint, although one could argue that it also kept them alive to recover (i.e. Jaguar in XBox One and PS4 being a volume contract part) [0]. They did a lot of moves that caused short term pain (that glofo spinnoff helped pay off the ATI Acquisition AFAIR) but helped them become the company that is still surviving today. [0] - One odd side note, I still find it odd th…
Likes it
> However it might actually be the inferior gaming machine for CPU/main RAM intense strategy or simulation games (e.g. Stellaris). On Stellaris I remember having a pretty good experience (not stellar) playing on a 2012 AMD FX-8350 desktop cpu. The six year old midrange laptop cpu Ryzen 4650u smokes that desktop cpu. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/1780vs3766/AMD-FX-8350-... Just to draw out the fact that with the Steam machine you will have a better Stellaris experience than what I had 7-8 years ago. (Because I assume even better performance than this laptop class cpu) My thoughts go more on the question if 15GB ram 8GB VRAM is enough for the next 7 years. And if Steam verified will all be split up, and become more confusing, between the 3 different devices they have.
Doesn’t like it
I've been using AMD since 2004. My first AMD processor was the Athlon 64 3000+, I was a kid I wasn't really allowed anything too expensive. We had dominately used Intel upt that point but when 64bit CPUs hit it was a revolutionary thing. The roughest era of AMD CPUs was the FX era. While it was comprable to its mid-range competition it was alos a sure fast way to burn down your house with its power draw. Ryzen was a huge step forward in CPU design and architecture. I see this era as Intel's FX era, if they have the right leadership in place they can turn the boat around and innovate.
Neutral
I rely on laptops provided by corporations I work at, so here's the breakdown of the remaining electronics: 1) samsung s10 (2014) -> iphone 8 (2018) -> iphone 13 mini (2022) -> no replacement planned since Apple dropped mini lineup. 2) gaming pc: amd fx-8350 (2012) -> i7-6700k (2016) -> 7800x3d (2023) -> hopefully no replacement till 2027 3) tablet: nexus 7 (2012) -> galaxy tab s3 (2018) -> ipad pro 2021 (2022) -> unless battery completely dies earlier than in 4 years like it happened with nexus 7 (making it stationary device). So overall, my update cycle is every 4 years on avg, with PC upgrades having longer cycles thanks to exceptional performance of the chosen platform at the time I.e. I still have i7-6700k working at another location and delivering strong both for productivity and gaming use cases.
Likes it
Fwiw, I have 3 ThinkPad t420 and t420s running around the household, used daily, they're at about a decade. Just replaced my main desktop which was fx8350, but that computer is now on its 2nd life with a friend and shows no signs of stopping. There was a time when 10 year old computer was absolute rubbish. These days, if you upgrade from spinning drive to ssd, 10 year old well made computers are just fine :) Basically, in 3 decades of personal computing, I never had a CPU failure other than that one time I crushed atlon xp with the heatsink :O
Likes it
These were interesting results then, but I think code generation and OSes have evolved enough that current compiles on a current OS with a current toolchain are actually faster on an FX-8150 than on an i5 of the age from those results. Even from the time that Ryzen first came out until now, OSes have been improving threading, reducing contention, et cetera, to noticeable degrees. Tell you what - when I'm back on the coast that has my older machines, I'll run some modern compiles on a quad i5 of that era and on my FX-8150, and we'll see. If nothing else, perhaps it'll be interesting to see how much threading performance has improved in the last decade. BTW - I did do side-by-side testing back then between the quad i7 and the FX-8150, and the results were certainly not as clear cut as these. Then again, I wasn't building a huge, barely portable source tree with -J 8 like Chromium - I was building many separate things in parallel at the same time. The cost is what ultimately tipped me in favor of AMD. Not everyone who bought AMD then was necessarily a fanboi, and I'd point out that people who were fans of the Ryzens when they were new often liked both how they were very favorably priced compared with anything Intel, plus how we were assured that later Ryzens would work in our then current motherboards. Having just replaced a Ryzen 2600 with a Ryzen 5700X and seeing overall power usage go down, I'd have to disagree with your early Ryzen sentiment.
Likes it
i used an fx-6300 for years and it was fine. for most use cases the practical need for desktop cpu performance plateaued 10 years ago. during that time adding more memory and moving from hdd to ssd made a much larger difference in user experience than increasing the cpu performance. the biggest problem for amd was not the architecture of the cpu, but the lack of integrated graphics on high end parts, and power efficiency on mobile. both of which were caused by being stuck on an older process. it's also worth remembering that internally amd had a grand vision of unifying the cpu and gpu (HSA) which would have added a bunch of fp compute to the integrated chip, but that vision required a lot of other things to go right, and a lot of them went wrong, so it never happened.
Likes it
I agree and I also think the timing of it's release helped as well. It came out about a year before the new Xbox and Playstation consoles were released and which were both using AMD silicon. So from a gaming perspective it was passable. It could run last gen console ports well and didn't struggle much with next gen. I had a FX-8320E that was used almost exclusively for gaming and it was fine.