AMD has been a bit quiet with their CPU releases lately. There haven’t been a lot of flagship releases or new sockets for a while now. But they are improving their old CPU’s as we speak. They’ve just released the new versions of their FX-6350, FX-8350 and FX-8370 CPU’s. Their goal is to achieve higher clockspeeds with lower temps. That’s also why they released their new cooling solutions for desktop processors. Their flagship cooler is the AMD Wraith cooler, which also comes with the ealier mentioned processors.
After AMD asked me to review their new FX-6350 which now supports DirectX 12 and has a higher clock and boost speed then the previous version of their FX-6350 (runs at 3,9Ghz instead of 3,5Ghz) I basically couldn’t say no. I was very curious on how much the performance improved compared to my “Old” FX-4350. And in every day use, I can really feel the difference. I’ve been using it for about one and a half week now, and I love it.
AMD’s FX 6350 is a curious, but very valid value proposition
AMD also ships their new high-end AMD CPU’s with their new Wraith cooler, which works perfectly. It has the same temperatures as the Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO I used on my FX-4350. Which in my opinion is amazing for a stock cooler.
My own pc has a FX-4350 in it so that’s why I was wondering if those 2 cores (on a bit lower clockspeed) really made that much of a difference. And for me it did, I feel like programs are reaction quicker to my responses and I can do a lot more stuff at the same time without noticing that my pc becomes slower.
The CPU also could handle a lot more heavy loads at the same time. For example, I was able to stream and have my browser open playing YouTube video’s, which wasn’t possible with my FX-4350.
Overall I think this just might be the best “Budget-Performance” CPU that you are able to get on the market at the time of writing. There’s a lot to like, and though the upgrade path stops here, it does allow an inexpensive boost in speed.
We compared the FX-6350 to my own FX-4350 and to some CPU’s we’ve tested before. Those include the AMD x4 860K, the AMD x4 845 and the Intel Pentium G4400.
Review System specs:
- AMD FX-6350
- ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2.0
- Kingston HyperX Fury Black 8GB
- Transcend SSD370S (256 GB)
- Cooler Master GX-Lite 700W Black
- MSI GTX 960 Gaming 2G
- Windows 8.1 64 bit
- NVidia Drivers 368.25
AMD FX-6350
$137.59
Pros
- Great price - performance ratio
- Great cooling solution
- High clockspeed + lot of cores
Cons
- Draws quite a bit of power