Overall and Final Verdict
After spending time with both the AMD FX-8320E and the MSI 970 Gaming I came out with a mostly positive outlook. For starters, the board is packed full of features and is selling for a great price. When you combine the board with the FX-8320E you have a combo that costs less than a lot of Intels Mid range CPUs and well below Intel’s enthusiast CPUs. What does that money get you? Well for performance things are a little lacking in CPU specific benchmarks, giving you numbers similar to the aged i5-2500k. That said when it comes to gaming performance, this is more than enough power for most games on the CPU side. You can use the money you have saved to invest even more in your video card where you will see even bigger gains.
Cooling testing showed the FX-8320E to be the coolest running CPU we have tested so you shouldn’t need to spend too much on cooling as well. Being AMD’s low wattage model it is a little disappointing to see Intel’s most recent flagship i7’s pulling less wattage, but this is the downside to running an ageing architecture.
So is this the buy for you? Well if you are looking to build a low budget gaming PC both the motherboard and CPU would be on my radar for sure. You have a relatively low investment and you still get good gaming performance. Use the rest of your money picking up the best possible video card you can get and possibly an SSD as well and you will have a nice budget build.