It looks like AMD has launched another product in China with little fanfare. Earlier this week we noted that AMD partners had started supplying AMD Radeon R9 390 cards kitted out with 4GB GDDR5 in China. This time it's a new CPU that has taken us by surprise, the budget-friendly AMD FX-6330 Black Edition.
The AMD FX-6330 Black Edition is a slight upgrade of the firm's existing FX-6300 CPU - as you might guess from the minor model number increment. The new processor offers all the same specs as the Socket AM3+ 6300 such as six Vishera cores, 6MB of L2 cache and 8MB of L3 cache and a TDP of 95W. However the clocks on the FX-6330 are edged slightly higher; it offers a base clock speed of 3.6Ghz and a turbo speed of 4.2GHz.
As a Black Edition part buyers have the freedom to tinker liberally in overclocking. Chinese website PCPop has already done a bit of overclocking with this new processor and compared it to the non-overclocked results and against a competitive sparring partner, the Intel Core i3-4160.
The AMD FX-6330 retails for approximately the equivalent of $110 in China. It looks good in most benchmarks against the Intel i3 alternative (there are more shown in the original PCPop report) and comes in about $15 cheaper than that Intel processor at the time of writing. Of course there's a lot more than the CPU to consider when building a system, the aging AM3+ platform might put a dampener on hopes of selling many FX-6330 CPUs, for example.
