By Dave James
When AMD tells us it’s sending over a new FX-series CPU, we can’t help the sudden rush of excitement. It’s an automatic response, born of a time when a new AMD CPU had the potential to offer something genuinely competitive.
But those days seem long gone. All we get now are half-hearted revisions of increasingly elderly chips.
The FX-8320E is the perfect example of that. AMD released this chip late last year, along with the FX-8370E as a pair of lower-powered octo-core CPUs for the more power-conscious consumer.
These two chips use AMD’s Bulldozer processor tech and squeeze into a 95W TDP. They’re able to do this by utilising a lower base clock, but retaining the same Turbo clock as their non-E brethren.
To that end, this FX-8320E is running at 3.2GHz as standard, with the ability to hit 4GHz as needed. The standard FX-8320’s clockspeed sits some 300MHz higher at 3.5GHz.
So far, so good. For 30W less power you only sacrifice 300MHz of CPU horsepower, which seems like a pretty good trade-off.
But the fact these CPUs are still running with an outdated version of the Bulldozer architecture makes them seem more like an afterthought than a proper …read more
Source: techradar.com – PC and Mac
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