Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I am a pragmatist when it comes to computer hardware so don't worry about this little review being untrustworthy on account of product love. I got this as an upgrade for one of my dedicated render (Blender Cycles and Luxrender) machines. I equip those render machines with AMD CPUs instead of Intel ones since, even though they are not AS fast, they give great mutli-threaded performance and - in my experience - put on less heat and are therefore are more stable for long, intense, workloads. I still use an Intel i7-960 in my main system since Intels chips are so expensive and often need a whole new motherboard to go with them. By comparison AMDs chips work on motherboards old, new, and still to come. Another point of comparison between the two is the heat that they put on. The i7 has on several occasions (usually during long Luxrender runs) actually overheated and shut down the computer. So far this FX-8350 has yet to go above 58C and outperforms the i7 system by more than 40% in the applications I use it with. I do realize that the i7-960 is both older and a 45nm chip as opposed to the brand new (at time of writing) and 32nm architecture of this FX chip. So some may view this as an unfair comparison. Maybe, but for anyone in a similar situation (wanting to upgrade to a new chip from their old Intel but unwilling or unable to cover the costs of the upgrade) may be interested in looking at this great CPU. Update (April 2013): The 8350 continues to work every bit as well as I said before. I recently upgraded the CPU in my Intel system to an i7-990X (the best available that my 1366 motherboard will support, and at time of writing $900). Across some practical tests with Blender, Luxrender, and Adobe Premiere Pro the performance between the two is very close with the 8350 still showing better performance in Luxrender. A heat comparison between the two would be unfair since I have the 8350 using the stock fan and heatsink that came with it and have put an Antec Kuhler 920 on the i7-990X. However, I think it is worth noting that, even with this advantage, the i7-990X stays only 4 degrees celsius cooler (compared to the air cooled 8350) under heavy load. Finally, for the price of a single top of the line Intel CPU with a Liquid cooler you could literally get two top of the line AMD CPUs with great motherboards - this is especially great if you do any distributed computing like I do.