User Review: Crosshair V Formula-Z & FX 8350 Overclocking & Performance

Roughly speaking, the new [83xx Series] FX processor at the same clock offers between 3-25% higher performance than the previous generation [81xx Series] of FX processor. In the most common cases the differences are about 10-15%. That’s not bad for a simply architecture refresh on the same production process. The processor has had tiny changes that have streamlined many processes (bugs removed) from the one previous. Even this, however, counts, and so Piledriver is already more capable than Bulldozer to the masses of AMD fans.

Now let’s take the ROG Crosshair V Formula-Z motherboard. It is in principle perhaps the very best piece of hardware and I have uploaded the newer [Vishera compatible] BIOS, otherwise the setup is fully identical.

Test Selection

Unfortunately, for reasons of time [I could not do extensive testing]. We are able to see some world-class reviews for example at www.hardware.fr [bring your translator]. Even so, I have included several graphs to compare and FX8350 and FX8150 at their default values ​​and then after maximum “stable” overclocking.

• Memory sub-tests: AIDA64, MaxxMem
• Calculation of Pi: very old school SuperPi 16M, newer wPrime 32M and 64M, older PiFast and modern MaxxPi.
• Graphics benchmnarks: 3DMark06, 3DMark Vantage, 3DMark11, DosBox, Unigine Heaven DX11
• Rendering: Cinebench R10, Cinebench R11.5, POV-Ray 3.7
• Video Compression: x264 4.0, x264 FHD
• CPU complex test: Fritzchess benchmark, CPU 3DMark Vantage, Physics 3DMark 11, Geekbench, UCbench
• Working with files compression and decompression: WinRAR 4.20, 7-zip

Results

3Dmark 11 Physics: purely a score due to the processor

Memory subtests in AIDA64: the more MB/s the better:

Rendering in POV-Ray:

(Elderly x87) SuperPi:

3DMark Vantage CPU score:

The full 3DMark results:

Memory test MaxxMem in GB/s bandwidth:

Scores in Cinebench R10 for one and computational benchmark kernels Nuclearus.

Cinebench R11.5 results:

Complex tests of Geekbench and Fritzchess:

System Stability Tester can test through one or more cores and with different ways, while MaxxPi loads all cores and utilizes the newer instructions.

wPrime loads all threads but PiFast is only single threaded…

Ucbench is a bruteforce password cracking benchmark that uses multi-core and SSE2, SSSE3, SSE4.1.

DosBox uses very low resolution benchmark Quake 1 and is thus dependent on brute forcing a single core on the CPU without much optimization. Unigine Heaven running on the contrary requires FullHD resolution with DirectX 11.

WinRARand 7-zip indicate the strength of compression and decompression. This is after OC, especially with 7-zip, really huge.

2-pass x264 is representative of video encoding

 See Overclocking and Undervolting Benefits on Page 2