Is the AMD FX-8320 Good for Video Editing?

It really depends on the software you're planning to use. But keep in mind the FX-8320 is an 8-core CPU that can only effectively use 4 cores at the same time for frame rendering. I'm the owner of an FX-8350, paired until not too long ago with 16GB of DDR3. Rendering in After Effects using all 8 cores was slow, but ...seeing the CPU was being used at its max, each core being used at 100% and the GPU barely used (that's how it is), I tried to cope with it, until I realized the FX actually shares resources and thus I could have a shot at rendering using only 4 cores.

Guess what - rendering times improved....they decreased drastically and CPU usage stopped being a constant 100%.

Let me get this straight: After Effects uses all available CPU resources to render one frame (from 0% rendered to 100% rendered), but you can tell it to use certain amount of cores to render multiple frames at the same time (multiple times from 0% - 100% at the same time), in which case a quad CPU could render 4 frames at the same time.

Imagine the FX 8320 as being a house with 4 boxes. In each box there are 2 trains. Sometimes these trains need to get on the same railway...forcing them to do that at the same time only makes them slower because, like it or not, one needs to stop and let the other pass since they share the same rails at some point on their trip from A to B.
So, a good way of putting the CPU to good use is to use each train A from every box to carry the heavy stuff while every train B from each box would only appear from time to time to offload some work from train A, when possible.

A real 8 core CPU with 8 independent cores would behave the way FX acts when using 4 cores for individual frame rendering, obviously rendering twice as much in the same amount of time, while costing...err...$1000?

The FX has an architecture based on modules. Each module contains 2 cores. Inside each module, the pair of cores share certain things so putting both cores inside a module at 100% power is only gonna be as fast as the shared resources can handle things...and it's definitely not faster than rendering 4 frames at the same time (instead of 8).

... keep in mind the FX-8320 is an 8-core CPU that can only effectively use 4 cores at the same time for frame rendering

Click to expand...

:lol:
What a pant-load

Depending upon your video editing software, most of the heavy lifting should be done by the GPU.

Sony Vegas could use the GPU better for video conversion and things like that, but software like Adobe's After Effects mostly uses the CPU for rendering, ray-tracing and all that.