Synthetic Benchmarks

The AMD FX-8320E demonstrated excellent multi-threading performance in the Cinebench synthetic benchmark utility, though despite a significant clock speed advantage, the FX-8320E was just 6% faster than the Core i3-4430. Overclocking the FX-8320E boosted performance by a further 38% for a score of 706 CBMarks.

The single thread performance was interesting as the Core i5-4430 was 15% faster than the 4.6GHz overclocked FX-8320E, while the Core i3-4360 was 31% faster.

The 3DMark Cloud Gate scores suggest that the AMD FX-8320E would be an ideal choice for gamers as it was 5% faster than the Core i5-4430 before any overclocking took place. Moreover, it was 13% faster than the similarly priced Core i3-4360.

The 3Dmark 06 results are remarkably different to 3Dmark Cloud Gate's results. This is likely due to the fact that the CPU testing is not optimized for multiple cores, giving the Core i3-4360 an advantage. In fact, the Core i3-4360 came out on top of the Core i5-4430 thanks to its superior clock speed.

As a result, the Core i3-4360 was 48% faster than the AMD FX-8320E and overclocking the FX-8320E to 4.6GHz only reduced that margin to 24%.

PCMark 7 test looks at general system performance and the Core i3-4360 looks good here again as it was 5% faster than the Core i5-4430 and 20% faster than the FX-8320E.

The PCMark 8 home suite favors the i5-4430, giving it a 45% performance advantage over the FX-8320E. Even once overclocked to 4.6GHz, the FX-8320E was still outpaced by 13% and the i3-4360 was also 7% faster than AMD's chip.

The i5-4430 was 36% faster than the FX-8320E in the creative suite test while the i3-4360 was 7% faster, but overclocking the FX-8320E allows for a strong comeback with performance that manages to exceed the i5-4430.

The i5-4430 dominated the work suite test, delivering 32% more performance than the FX-8320E. Even with the aid of our overclock, the FX-8320E was topped by i5's 14% lead.

The office suite is based on PowerPoint, Word and Excel. Here the i3-4360 was slightly faster than the i5-4430 and 23% faster than the AMD FX-8320E. That said, overclocking the FX-8320E to 4.6GHz allowed it to overtake the Intel processors, beating the i5-4430 by a 2% margin.