Heavy-load tests
Ah, the boot is on the other foot in heavily multi-threaded tasks. AMD's eight cores outmuscle Intel's four on the 3570K. FX-8350 is nine per cent better than FX-8150 through a combination of architecture tweaks and frequency jump - 4.1GHz vs. 3.9GHz - when using all cores.
Bulldozer-based FX-8150 and Core i5-3570K are tied in the as-many-cores-as-you've-got CINEBENCH test. FX-8350, meanwhile, adds an extra 11 per cent to both, representing good performance for the price. The Core i7-3770K, which costs at least £100 more, continues to lead the pack.
Playing to the FX's strengths, performance in 7-zip's compression test is stellar.
We use v5.01 of the X264 HD test for our editorial purposes, and it runs very well on AMD FX hardware. It's one case where the FX-8350 chip pulls out a genuine lead over its FX-8150 counterpart.
AMD's FX-8350 is better than Intel's roughly price-equivalent Core i5-3570K in genuinely multi-threaded applications. Heck, eight cores has got to better than four in some situations, right?
