The Long Life of My FX-8350

Everyone remembers the first PC that they built themselves. If not the specific parts, at the very least the gist and of course the experience. I know that I remember every bit of it, the suspense of waiting on the parts, how nervous i was seating the CPU, all of it. Specifically, the choice to go with a 8350 over a 2500k stands out to me, for a whole lot of reasons. The 2500k is infamous for being an incredible value and providing amazing performance long past its prime, whereas the 8350 gets a bad rap for all kinds of reasons, especially the single core performance. Obviously, if I knew what I knew now I would have made a different choice, but I don't regret picking the 8350. Rather, I think it was in the grand scheme of things one of the best decisions I’ve ever made with computer hardware.

Let's back things up a bit. Choosing the 8350 over a 2500k was a good choice? How in the hell? That's right! My 8350 has lived a long and hard life, and has been put through just about every punishment possible excepting sub zero cooling. The poor bastard has run overclocked nearly its whole life, and spent more than a small portion of that time right below or slightly above the official temperature threshold. This is the CPU that I learned to overclock on, so of course it’s taken some punishment over the years. Beyond that, there was a long period of time in my earlier days that I spent chasing numbers in benchmarks with the one somewhat competitive piece of hardware I had at the time, my poor 8350. And it took it like a champ. What it lacked in performance and what I lacked in money was compensated for with voltage and heat, and the 8350 never broke down on me, never quit, never gave out.
Beyond the consistent punishment in benchmarks, the chip has run many different configurations, some of which far beyond the reasonable demands for a chip of it’s caliber. I’ve benched with 3 290x in one go with this chip, run a 295x2 overclocked for a number of months, currently the system sports an overclocked Fury X. I’ve run virtual machines with RAM usage at near 100% with nearly 100% network utilization as well at near 100% system load for days, I’ve streamed video while playing games, as far as capable goes the 8350 has more than proved its worth.

So what inclined me to buy this “wonderful” chip at the time? Well, at the time I bought my parts, the 8350 was on sale, and effectively 40-50 bucks cheaper than ole 2500k. Beyond that, the platform cost was lower, and my high school self was strapped for cash. Beyond that, I knew that Intel had better gaming performance, but I knew i would never just be gaming. And, true to that thought, this has almost always been the case. Typically, I’ll have 3-5 crypto clients running in the background, firefox with 50+tabs, music and/or a video playing in the background, as well as a service like skype, discord, or others going in the background, and even then I’ll stream sometimes on top of all that. Despite my older chip barely keeping up with newer processors, once all that multitasking is thrown into the mix the 8350 holds its ground pretty damn well. Again, not bad for a chip that’s going on 5 years old. 

As for the CPU itself, as stated above this is where I cut my teeth learning to overclock. The 8350 is a great overclocking chip, and when I purchased mine it was still very common to get a 4.8ghz chip. Overclocking on AMD was a very different beast from Intel, and in many ways still is today. The ability to tweak not only the multiplier but the FSB allowed for all kinds of variations. I found that certain FSB+multi combinations were far more stable than others, allowing me to drop either my LLC settings or even voltage sometimes, and shift some of that load to the motherboard. One of the biggest obstacles and problems I’ve faced with this chip is the heat, oh my god does this chip love to get hot. Because of the constant struggle with heat though, I’ve learned far more than I would have with any other chip about cooling.
I’ve gone through a number of cases since I built this computer, and in each one cooling has been a struggle, until very recently (with a switch to a Silverstone FT05). I was constantly looking for ways to bring my temperatures down. Better fans, optimizing airflow, static pressure vs. airflow fans, better coolers, thermal pastes, you name it. I’ve tried all different kinds of thermal paste and more than 5 coolers on my 8350, and after finding the paste that worked the best for me, and slapping an NH-D14 on there, I still wasn’t satisfied. I upgraded to a Cryorig R1 Ultimate (Sold the NH-D14 to a friend that was building his first computer so he could overclock as well), and my temps did in fact drop. But I still wanted more. I kept digging through forums until I found a promising lead.

I lapped my 8350! The performance gain was about as predictable as others had suggested, roughly 3-5c. But that was huge for me. On an Intel system with a temperature limit near 90c, that really isn't too great for all the work entailed, but on my 8350, that added nearly 10% more overhead for overclocking! I was over the moon. I had the best cooler, the best thermal paste, the best heat transfer, and the most optimized settings I could manage between my motherboard and CPU. Again, bear in mind this poor CPU made it through hours and hours of wet sandpaper.

Is my 8350 the best chip for the money? Hell no. Is it the fastest? It never was! Do i regret buying it? Absolutely not. Call it nostalgia, or a sick form of Stockholm Syndrome, but this chip has taken everything I’ve thrown at it, even 1.6v trying to hit 5.6 on air (I was a younger, much more stupid man then). This chip has survived lapping, running over spec, running over temp, running 4 sticks of RAM (which is harder than hell on the weak IMC on the 8350), virtualization, gaming, streaming, multitasking, number crunching, every form of punishment you can imagine. I don't regret the purchase one bit. And now, with Ryzen out, it’s looking more and more like upgrade season for me. With that thought, I’m almost sad to let go of such a hardy and faithful chip. One of the great parts of upgrading though means that I can pass my parts on, specifically to my younger brother. He’s really getting into computers and we built his first computer together 2 years ago, but it was weak when we built it. Now, he has a chance to play with an amazing CPU, motherboard, and system altogether, and learn the same way i did. Make the same mistakes, and expect the same forgiveness from the CPU. I wouldn’t pick any other CPU or system for him to learn and experience this on, and I’m glad my trusty old, “moar cores” 8350 will live on, helping another get involved and excited about computers, as well as overclocking and tweaking systems.

Thanks for the ride 8350, it’s been a hell of a good one.