I noticed improvements when I went from my 945 to 8320. Course I clocked the 8320 up to 4.5Ghz. Clock for clock at the same speed the old Phenom X6 will win aside from heavy multitasking. But overall, I think I saw more when I changed from an AM2+ board to AM3+. I was using an old nForce570SLI and went to a 990FX. Being able to use faster RAM and all the AM3 features gave a visible speed up that did get better with the FX.
It wasn't really huge in gaming but it did depend on the game. Some games did see good improvement. However, in video encoding, which I do a lot of, it was huge. This puppy handbrakes through 24min vids in about 3 mins where before I was over double that.
I'd save some money and go 8320, then clock it to 8350 speeds. Hopefully you get a good chip like mine and it just exceeds it. They do 4.5Ghz on air, any higher and you want water cooling. Just turn off LLC when you clock to get stable otherwise you'll be soaking your CPU with excess voltage to get the same clock. Guides don't seem to address that or tell you anything about it. Even reviewers seem to miss that, stating huge voltages required to reach the high clocks. With LLC on I had to do over 1.45v or more on CPU just to get it stable at 4.4Ghz. With LLC off I do about 1.3875v, completely stable at 4.5Ghz.
For me it just came down to the thought...ok if the 8350 is doing over 4Ghz on stock clocks then why should these CPUs need such high voltage to get the same clocks when manually clocked? Just didn't make sense to me. Had to be another factor causing it, which when I tested, turned out to be LLC. Others can prove me wrong if they can give a clear explanation of why LLC needs to be on. But I've been going prolly a year now on this build without issues. Lots of heavy encoding tasks/etc. Gotten good use out of this 8320.
