AMD Vishera FX-8350 Review Roundup

~15% performance gains in some areas, but is it enough?

AMD hasn't exactly been killing it lately. Bulldozer was a flop, shares have been declining, and the company will cut almost 1800 jobs by the end of the year. Ouch.

Intel has opened up a clear lead on the CPU front in the past few years. With Tuesday's launch of Vishera, the follow-up to Zambezi, AMD looks to close that gap. Zambezi CPUs were energy hogs with poor single-threaded performance; despite being priced the same as the i5-2500K, the FX-8150 struggled to compete with Phenom II chips in certain scenarios. AMD's strategy with Vishera, which uses 32nm Piledriver cores, is to regain lost ground in regards to performance while also changing the entry price points of their CPUs.

Deal Alert: SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 7950 for $270 AR, Plus Free Stuff

This AMD "Never Settle" thing looks pretty tempting.

Right now, Newegg has a SAPPHIRE HD 7950 3GB card for $290 with a $20 mail-in rebate. $270 is already a pretty solid price for a 7950, but when you throw in Far Cry 3, Hitman: Absolution, and Sleeping Dogs (not to mention 20% off Medal of Honor: Warfighter), this deal gets straight up ridiculous.

I'm seriously thinking about trading up from my 1GB 560 Ti. Sure, we're near the end of a GPU generation, but that bundle is insane. Plus, 1GB of VRAM is starting to cramp my style a little bit, so the move to 3GB would open up some more options for the future.

Gaming at 2560x1440? Yes please.

AMD Trinity: Cheap Desktop Gaming

Last Thursday, AMD lifted the NDA covering their Trinity desktop APUs... sort of. Review sites were allowed to discuss GPU performance of the chips but weren't allowed to disclose much of anything else. Today the curtain gets pulled back fully.

Source: AnandTech

For the uninitiated, an accelerated processing unit (APU) is "a processing system that includes additional processing capability designed to accelerate one or more types of computations outside of a CPU" (Wikipedia). Basically, both AMD and Intel are taking the approach of throwing GPU cores onto their mobile and desktop CPUs. In general, Intel has the edge when it comes to processing power while AMD maintains a pretty sizable lead in the graphics department.

GPU News: GTX 660 and 650, AMD's Countermove, and Next-Gen

The GPU market has been pretty active over the last couple of days. After last week's new releases AMD and Nvidia basically have all of their chips on the table at this point. Time for price cut battles and holiday discounts over the next few months.

GTX 650, 660 Unveiled

Last Thursday, Nvidia released the GTX 650 and GTX 660 graphics cards in an effort to fill the gigantic void in their 600-series lineup. The 650 is Nvidia's budget gaming offering and comes in at $110. The 660 falls in line behind the 660 Ti at $230.

I thought about making my own nifty little table showing the tech specs of the newest cards in comparison with what's already on the market, but TechPowerUp already has an incredibly extensive one that would put mine to shame. Here it is:

Source: TechPowerUp