Amd fx articles

AMD is one of the world's oldest CPU makers and the subject of polarizing debate among tech enthusiasts for nearly 50 years. Its story makes for a thrilling tale of twists and turns that we examine today from past to present.

Today's CPU review is all about AMD's performance progress, comparing a flagship part from the AMD FX era and all Ryzen series with just 4 cores enabled at a fixed frequency to make direct comparisons, and then some.

Today we're going to do something a little different just for fun and look at the top 5 worst CPUs released in the last few years. This is not intended to be taken as seriously as one of our buying guides, and if you happen to have one of these CPUs please don't be offended. In fact, under certain conditions they might even be a justified purchase. Without further ado, let's see why we think these are bad picks for most users...

After extensive testing, we've come up with this quick guide to bring you the best CPU choices available right now, divided into four categories: The Best Enthusiast/Value Gaming CPU, Best Extreme Desktop CPU, Best All-Round High-End CPU and Best Budget CPU.

These days you might expect buying a new processor to be fairly straightforward. The choice seems clear: Intel has proven to offer superior core performance with considerably greater efficiency. However, many enthusiasts argue that AMD offers better overclocking on its more affordable processors and therefore delivers a better bang for your buck. We put that notion to the test.

Intel has been beating AMD on every front but price for a couple of generations now as the Bulldozer microarchitecture and its descendants have had an unpleasant uphill climb. Power consumption, performance per clock, it all takes its toll. However, we took a couple of AMD's most popular chips for a test drive and found that things aren't anywhere near as bad as benchmarks might lead you to believe. Quite the opposite, actually.

About this time last year, AMD's new Bulldozer-based FX series launched to bright-eyed system builders who expected the new architecture to challenge Intel's increasingly comfortable position in the upper-end processor market. Unfortunately, Bulldozer wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

Now, the company is refreshing its desktop processors with Piledriver, an enhanced version of Bulldozer that focuses on improving instructions per clock and frequency. In other words, instead of a major overhaul, Piledriver picks up where Bulldozer left off, which may disappoint those who wanted AMD to abandon the architecture.

The Phenom II has had to deal with the Intel Core i7 on multiple platforms, as well as the Core i5 and Core i3 processors, for almost 3 years now. After all this time, is the pain finally coming to an end for AMD?

Today AMD is launching its new FX processor lineup comprised of the flagship FX-8150 along with the FX-8120, FX-6100 and FX-4170 processors. Keep reading as we explore the inner details of AMD's new FX series and we benchmark all four new processors being launched today.