Electronic: AMD FX-8350 FX-Series 8-Core Black Edition

This is the 4 GHz version. There is a 5 GHz version the FX-9590 for a considerable premium. It consumes twice as much power. The FX-8350 requires an AM3+ socket. I have a 6-core slower version of this chip. Some of the cores are usually idle, so I would expect 4 of these cores to mostly sit idle unless you have many tasks running at once. It is a black edition which means it will let you overclock. I don’t overclock but I a prefer a black edition CPU because it means the chip has been tested to run faster than spec. This implies it will run extra-reliably at nominal speed. Has extended instruction set including AES encryption in hardware. Suitable motherboards include ASRock 970 EXTREME4, Asus M5A99FX PRO R2.0 or the ASUS SABERTOOTH 990FX. You want a motherboard with AM3+ socket and room for at least 16 GB of DDR3-1866 RAM (233 MHz multiplied) There is no point is getting such a fast CPU then hobbling it with slow RAM. Some people use DDR3-2133 and overclock. For hairy chips like this, you want a good quality power supply and heavy-duty cooling. The chip alone consumes 125 watts.

On Chip Cache

Level 1 is small and fast. Level 3 is big and slower
Level 1 cache size is 4 × 64 KB shared instruction caches and 8 × 16 KB data caches
Level 2 cache size is 4 × 2 MB shared exclusive caches
Level 3 cache size 8 MB shared cache.