AMD Piledriver: FX4300 review

AMD FX4300 Review

AMD recently released its new line of processors codenamed Vishera and based on the 'Piledriver' architecture.

This new line of FX processors are going to replace the older Bulldozer FX processors.

Today we will be looking at the entry level FX4300 which is meant to replace the FX4100

Before we get to the benchmarks let me mention that the new FX processors are about 14% faster than the older generation. Out of this 14%, 7% of the performance comes from raw architecture improvements. So this means an FX4300 will be 7% faster than a FX4100 when running at the same frequencies.

The remaining 7% of performance comes from the higher clock speeds. The new FXs are also said to be able to achieve higher overclocks.


So lets get to the processor itself.
The new FX4300 comes in at the 3.8Ghz clock speed and a turbo speed of 4Ghz

Benchmarks

Lets start with some benchmarks comparing the fx4300 to the similarly priced i3 3220

First we have games

First up is Diablo 3 at 1680x1050 resolution

As we can see the new fx4300 does get ahead of the similarly priced i3 3220. This may be because of the fact that Diablo 3 is pretty CPU intensive so the 2 module fx4300 performs better



Next up is Skyrim again at 1680 x 1050 resolution

Again another CPU intensive game and we can see the fx4300 pulling slightly ahead of the i3 3220.


Now lets look at some more benchmarks

We compressed a file using winrar and below are the compression times.
NOTE: lower is better

Here the i3 3220 performs better and gets the job done faster.


Finally we have Cinebench(multi-threaded)

Here again the i3 pulls slightly ahead of the fx4300.

Conclusion:

We see that AMD has indeed improved on the bulldozer significantly. Last Generation, when people asked me to help decide between an i3 2100 and a fx 4100 I used to always tell them to go for the i3 2100 but this generation I might actually recommend the fx 4300 over the i3 3220.

The fx4300 performs quite well out of the box and can also be easily overclocked.

It gives better performance over the i3 in certain applications such as cpu intensive games.

But for office users who are not much into gaming the i3 will be better as it is faster in day to day tasks.

Gamers however might prefer the fx4300 because of its awesome performance out of the box and overclock ability. 

AMD might still have a good chance against the competition if they keep going this way. Finally some of us can upgrade from out phenom iis to something newer and faster!