The Best Cpu For The Money Amd Vs Intel Budget Shootout Final Thoughts

The FX-8320E can be pushed well beyond its starting frequencies as we hit 15% over the maximum turbo boost and 44% over the base clock. However, as substantial as that may sound, it only produced 16% more performance in our application tests and 7% in our encoding and gaming benchmarks, which isn’t enough to best Intel’s offerings. When gaming with the FX-8320E clocked at 4.6GHz it was still slower than the stock Core i3-4360 on average in the four games that we tested and Intel’s i3 was also quicker in HandBrake and TMPGEnc Video Master Works. With that being the case, the FX-8320E doesn’t make much sense for encoding or gaming next to the dual-core Core i3-4360.

The FX-8320E holds its own in productivity apps: Microsoft Excel, Adobe Photoshop CC, After Effects CC, WinRAR or 7-zip, though in order to achieve that result it uses ~62% more power than the Core i3-4360. When clocked at 4.6GHz, the FX-8320E used 63% more power on average in our application tests, 55% more when encoding and 27% more when gaming. In the end, AMD’s FX-8320E is an affordable quad-core processor that overclocks decently, but even if you pushed it to 5GHz it would struggle to match the slightly pricier Core i5-4430 and even the Core i3-4360 at times. Then after you take the power consumption figures into account, arguments for the FX-8320E begin to seem rather indefensible. Free performance isn’t exactly free if it comes at the expense of drawing more power and needing a more efficient cooler, so the humble Core i3-4360 makes more sense than the FX-8320E for budget users. There may be some great reasons to buy the FX-8320E, but we don’t think it’s the chip you want if you’re after the best overall performance for the price. Separately, we were surprised by how well the dual-core i3-4360 performed against the quad-core i5-4430. Although it runs 500-700MHz faster and has Hyper-Threading, we thought there would be a larger gap in our application tests as the i5-4430 actually has four cores. Given the price difference, we would also suggest the i3-4360 over the i5-4430.