fx-8350 performance over fx-4100

Hello.
These are good examples of what you should expect:
PClab 7970 test
HardwarePal 7970 test
FX8350 is a good cheap solution.
Now if you want to go with Asus Maximus Formula this costs around $300.
And I guess you will want an i7 4770K. This is indeed the best but it costs 3x more.
Edit: A cheaper solution is an Asus Maximus VI Hero $192.98 with i7 4770K if you will not go with custom watercooling solutions.
Also an ASUS Z87-A $135.99 with a core i5 4670K would be good at around $350.

Go with an FX 8320 and clock it. The various benchmarks out there are showing different results with regards to FX 8350 vs a 2500k.

My quick response for now is in BF4 the FX-8350 actually beats the i5-2500k and ties with the i7-2600k. However, in BF3 the i5-2500k does beat the FX-8350. The FX-8350 does provide a decent performance increase over the FX-4100 across many games. But Intel CPUs generally rules over the FX-8350 in games.

It's not easy designing games to use multiple cores. Generally speaking more cores the game is designed to use more more time / money it will cost. There's also efficiency meaning how well can the CPU make use of the extra cores. For example, BF3 can use all 8 cores in the FX-8350, however the six core FX-6350 and the FX-8350 both provided the same performance. That just means each core in the FX-6350 was working harder than each core in the FX-8350.

That issue has been fixed in BF4, the FX-8350 now provided better performance than the FX-6350. However, the use of more than 2 cores only applies to to multiplayer. Benchmarks have not been released for single player yet, but I would guess that only 2 cores will be used. Also, BF4 is an exception, not the rule. Most games do not behave life BF4.

For the short term future of 3 - 4 years I would say that Intel CPU will overall perform better than AMD CPUs in games. After that it is unknown. I say that because I believe it will take time for game developers to effectively make use of all 8 cores.

Intel has the resources and money to pour into research to design ever more powerful CPUs. AMD on the other hand is not doing so well financially. They have always lagged behind Intel with investing into new CPUs. AMD must also devote research money on Radeons as well.

Thus far, there is no indication if there will be new socket AM3+ CPUs after the FX generation. It's not even known if socket AM4 CPUs are under development. Steamroller is the successor to Piledriver, but so far it is only going to be released for socket FM2+; AMD's APUs.

Basically all benchmarks have shown that AMD's APUs lags behind the FX CPUs. Sometime the difference is small while other times it is rather large. I suppose most of that is due to the lack of a L3 cache.

If AMD is truly not producing any more socket AM3+ or AM4 CPUs then they really need to improve the performance of the APU series to at least keep pace (not win) with Intel. AMD's 4th gen APU, Kaveri, is expected to be released for sale in Q1 2014. Hopefully for AMD's sake it will provide much better performance than the Richland generation APUs. The difference in performance between Trinity and Richland is even less than the performance difference (from a percentage view) of Haswell and Ivy Bridge.

Unless you have cash burning a hole in your savings account then going with anything other than simply dropping in an 8320/50 to you existing setup is nuts. One of the main perks of AM3+ has been/is ease of upgrade. The hundreds of additional dollars for switching platforms will yield marginal benefit. If you're really in the spending mood, buy 3 nice screens for eyefinity & an 8320. .

You'll also be left with a more than capable processor for a HTPC or server build.

Unfortunately, AMD has remained silent on any future CPUs for socket AM3+. Steamroller has only been officially announced for socket FM2+.