AMD Upgrade or no point?

[Tridanite]

Hello fellow stuff,

Currently I have a 8120 running at stock add I was wondering if it would be a good idea to upgrade to the new pile driver chips I believe it is the 8350. I do 3d modeling in Maya and particle sims in AE that have totaled over 3 million particles and the render times have been 2hrs plus. Is there any performance gain from this that warrants an upgrade? I have been to many reviews and have received mixed theories on yes and no.

My current build consists of:

Aforementioned Chip

12GB ram

2TB HDD

GPU is on the way (currently none)

As is a new PSU just haven't decided yet

Thanks for any advice!

Feel free to mention what you think would be a wiser long term solution for a student on a budget.

[Vanderburg]

For highly threaded applications, like rendering, AMD is a great solution. The 8350 is very affordable at ~$210 from Newegg, or $190 from Microcenter, if you can get to one (http://www.microcenter.com/product/401795/FX_8350_4GHz_AM3_Black_Edition_Boxed_Processor)

The answer really is if the processor is within your budget, I personally think it's a good investment, especially since you'll be able to make use of it. Piledriver has a pretty impressive performance increase over Bulldozer.

[fcemiliano]

Upgrading to a new CPU will help out to an extent, however; the GPU that is on its way will help out a lot more than upgrading your CPU. Personally I would just wait for your GPU, because you can easily overclock your 8120 to 4.0ghz, which is the stock for the 8350.

[Smartz13]

I agree that upgrading to the 8350 or 8320 would be a great idea. Get a good cooler like the NZXT Havik 140 or Corsair h100i and overclock the bad boy.

[The Man]

It really depends on how much the extra 5-25% performance boost means to you. If your current system doesn't feel fast enough, then an upgrade to piledriver may be worth it, albeit, it won't be a day/night type of diference. The 8350 is also cooler and consumes less power so you should be able to reach better clock speeds. If you can, I'd wait until steamroller or excavator comes out.

[skullbringer]

upgrading from 8120 to 8350 makes completely no sense to me. 8350 is good, but the very slight performance increase isnt worth the 200 bucks. Get a decent cooler, OC the hell out of that CPU and get a decent GPU for rendering (CUDA!).

If you have that much money, then you should upgrade to 3770k, much better performance per price then 8350.

[MiracleMan]

For professional use overclocking might not be the best solution, if you have any problems caused by that you are screwed.

For personal use i would say just overclock it, it is not that hard nowadays.

[Tridanite]

I love this forum haha and I think I will do what both fcemilliano and smartz13 and The Man in that I will wait for my gpu overclock my current cpu and wait for the next gen to get that extra performance instead :) cheers and thanks! ANd thank you vanders for linking and taking the time much appreciated.

[sazr]

I think that the CPU could be a good upgrade, but taking into consideration that you're on a tight budget, the best thing (like many have said already) is to wait for the GPU and see what happens. I'd definitely try to overclock the CPU first though, even if it implied buying some aftermarket cooling

[Reuben]

Buying a better cooler would get you more of a performance bump than throwing in an 8350 at stock speeds. An NZXT Kraken X60 or a Corsair H100i would allow you to get a pretty good overclock.

[Eric1024]

I have a little something to add that's somewhat on a different topic. I'm not entirely familiar with the programs you listed but I know that any kind of rendering can be very memory intensive. You should consider monitoring your memory usage during render times, and if it's getting close to using all 12GB then you should consider upgrading that as well.

I don't know what motherboard you have, but if you're using that chip I'm assuming you have a modern-ish board with 4 DIMM slots, so you could potentially upgrade to 2x8GB for 16GB, which leaves you 2 more slots open to upgrade with another 2x8GB for a total of 32GB in the future if you need it. And memory is so cheep these days that you could get a solid kit like this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233280 for 75$ or so.

Just my thoughts, hope it helps. Cheers! :)

[Dragon_Cannon]

Maya seems to leverage the GPU from what I've read. So once you have one of those you should see some considerable decrease in times for rendering.

Like others have said above overclock the snot out of the CPU to get what you can out of it because Maya also uses that for some things as well.

Rendering also benefits from fast memory as well.

If you can afford as SSD to use as a scratch disk that should also increase the performance for rendering.

[Umeshwarnath]

get a 212+ if you are not willing to spend too much on a cooler...it will easily let you take the 8120 to 4.2-4.4 ghz...get a Firepro card that fits in your budget....together they will cut the rendering time in half!!

[adamkalnoki]

I had an fx 8120 and upgraded to a 3570k it made all the difference i used the fx 8120 overclocked to 4.2 ghz but the 3570k is much faster even at stock speeds and it is not that more expensive than an fx 8350