[citation][nom]belardo[/nom]When Intel's Haswell comes out, it will still be 77w while gaining 10% more performance.The FX 8350 will need to equal the i7-3770 for anyone to take notice... At $250, to only equal the $215~230 i5-3570/K CPUs ($190 locally) with a hotter CPU without PCIe 3.0 or native USB3.0 support just won't impress anyone.Actually, PCIe 3.0 missing will always be a major hit on AMD. I'm not sure why they are even bothering with this?[/citation]
PCIe 3.0 is not a big deal at all, especially for CF where the second/third/fourth cards don't need as much bandwidth as the first one. Being native or not is also not a big deal for USB 3.0 (which is something that might be fixed in a new chipset anyway). Also, even the FX-8120 has better fully threaded performance than the i5s and the 83xx models would easily have much better fully threaded performance than any Haswell i5.
Sure, gaming performance isn't stellar at stock configurations, but for enthusiasts, that's easily rectified with fairly quick and easy core configuration modification and CPU/NB overclocking as well as CPU frequency overclocking. The FX-83xx models would probably be able to keep with the K edition i5s from Haswell without any issues if you simply spend a few minutes of work on them. The FX-8120 at $150 or $160 is already a very tempting offer for true computer enthusiasts. If the 83xx models can overclock much better at a given power consumption like they should, then assuming that they launch with adequate pricing, they could be great options.