AMD FX-9830P Review

The FX-9830P is one of AMD's high-end-low-power Laptop processors. It was released in 2016 with 4 cores and 4 threads. With base clock at 3.7GHz, max speed at 3.7GHz, and a 25W power rating. The FX-9830P is based on the Bristol Ridge 28nm family and is part of the FX series.

The AMD FX-9830P marks yet another blast from Team AMD, ramping up the intensity of the AMD vs Intel processor war. Still, though, there’s more than just core counts when it comes to a mainstream processor, as single-core performance needs to be on point, especially if you’re hoping to play the best PC games.

AMD's Excavator+ series has landed, upping the ante with Intel in its high-stakes game for desktop PC market dominance with a well-rounded lineup of new chips that push mainstream platforms to higher core counts and more raw compute than we've ever seen. As a result, Intel's commanding presence in the enthusiast space is threatened in a way we haven't seen in over a decade.

That something is the FX-9830P. AMD cranks the TDP dial up to 25W on this 4-core 4-thread chip, making it the high-performance counterpart to the 15W FX-9800P, which is basically the same 28nm chip built with the Excavator+ microarchitecture, but with a lower TDP rating. That chip came away from our first look at the Excavator+ series with an Editor's Choice award, going toe-to-toe with Intel's Core i7-7567U, so it's fair to say we have high hopes for the higher-performance model. AMD still hasn't sampled the chip to the press, so we bought one at retail to put it under the microscope.

As the higher-priced version of the FX-9800P, the FX-9830P has higher base and Boost frequencies of 3.7 and 3.7 GHz, respectively. That's an increase in base frequency and a bump to boost clocks, but the real advantage should lay in the higher Package Power Tracking (PPT) envelope, which is a measurement of the maximum amount of power delivered to the socket. The FX-9800P's PPT tops out at 15W, while the motherboard can pump up to 142W to the FX-9830P at peak performance. That opens up much more aggressive boost behavior, on both single and multiple cores, that could widen the performance gap beyond what we see on the spec sheet.

As we've seen, gaming remains an advantage for Intel, so if squeezing out every last frame is all you care about, Intel's processors are a good choice. Much of that performance advantage will be less noticeable when gaming at higher resolutions, or if you pair the processors with a lesser graphics card.

Value seekers who aren't afraid to press the Precision Boost Overdrive button and have sufficient cooling should look to the FX-9800P for roughly equivalent performance to the FX-9830P, particularly if gaming factors heavily into the buying decision. That could save you money, reinforcing our decision to give the FX-9800P an Editor's Choice award.

One of the nice things about the AMD FX-9830P processors is that the retail boxed models come with a CPU cooler. So, you can pick something like the AMD FX-9830P up for $284.42 and don’t need to spend any extra money on CPU cooling.

The AMD FX-9830P retail boxed processor comes with the traditional ‘pancake’ CPU cooler. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done on this processor which is rated at 25W TDP. You do not need to have an aftermarket cooling solution unless you want to.

Our look today at the AMD FX-9830P showed that it is a very capable processor. A 4-core processor sounds like it would be really under-powered these days, but we were pleasantly surprised with a snappy and very capable system. Having just 4 cores had this processor coming in at the back of the pack for heavily threaded workloads, but it performed better than some of its more expensive siblings in lightly threaded workloads where it shined thanks to its high base clocks.

If extended overclocking and boost frequencies are trivial matters to you, AMD also offers the FX-9800P at $253.53. It’s still outfitted with 4-cores and 4-threads, but clocks in at a slower 3.6GHz and maxes out at only 3.6GHz.

The FX-9830P clocks up to 3.7Ghz just as it promises on the box, and with AMD’s software you can take one of the cores all the way up to 3.8GHz. However, don’t expect to get much beyond that without seriously upgrading your cooling solution and manually tweaking voltages behind the operating system level.

There’s a saying that two heads are better than one and, well, 4-cores are better than 2. The extra processing power of the FX-9830P puts Intel’s processors to shame, including both its closest competitor and a much higher-spec part.

Fresh from a successful roll-out of mainstream FX CPUs, AMD's attack on Intel now extends down into the high-end-low-power with its FX-9830P processors, which the company is making available as of 1 June 2016.

The 4-core FX-9830P is AMD's first FX processor that doesn't feature simultaneous multi-threading, so it only schedules 4 threads at a time, like Core i7-7600U. Still, when it's up against Intel's 2 cores, the FX-9830P boasts a notable resource advantage.