Need Information: AMD Chipsets

[adnank77]

Hi .. 

 

Personally .. I find AMD CPUs very confusing in naming and features .. I'm still not sure about the differences between them .. 

 

Can anyone guide me to a good article where I can understand the differences .. I found quite few but they are cramped with so much historical information .. I'm interested in things from 2012 and further .. 

 

- What are the different kinds of chipsets / Sockets ?

- How many PCIe Lanes can each chipset support ? 

- What is the processor to chipset mapping for each ?

 

Thanks in Advance .. 

[Archangel1994]

There are really only 2 you need to know: 970 and 990FX. (unless you go APU)

 

970 for FX-6300, 990FX for anything above FX-6300.

 

Edit: Jk . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_chipsets gives all the info you need to know.

[Glenwing]

Socket AM3+ is AMD's older high-end platform, although it doesn't have a replacement yet.  The chipset of interest here is 990FX, although there is also the 970 chipset which is the lower cost chipset (like Z97 vs H97).  The 990FX chipset provides 38 PCIe 2.0 lanes which puts it on equal footing with Intel in terms of PCIe bandwidth, and the CPUs for it are the FX-8350 and other FX-x3xx series CPUs, and it also supports the older FX-x1xx series chips and the even older Phenom II series.  These CPUs do not have integrated graphics.

 

AMD's more budget oriented platform is for their APUs, which is what they call CPUs with integrated graphics.  The most current is socket FM2+ (F for fusion, since the chips combine a CPU and GPU together), and it supports 5000-7000 series APUs (A10-5800K, A10-6800K, A10-7850K, plus all the lower tier chips like A8, A6, etc.).  The high-end chipset for this socket is A88X.  This platform has 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes, again equal with Intel (their mainstream platform anyway).

[KeltonDSMer]

One thing to consider is the 990/970 chip sets do not determine what kind of power delivery/cooling a given motherboard has. I could have saved a few bucks purchasing a 970 mobo with good VRMs for my 8320; I instead went with a 990fx board, yet have no plans to go 4way crossfire or anything crazy like that lol.

 

Make sure to find a board that has all the SATAIII and USB3.0 ports you might need.

[i_build_nanosuits]

Hi .. 

 

Personally .. I find AMD CPUs very confusing in naming and features .. I'm still not sure about the differences between them .. 

 

Can anyone guide me to a good article where I can understand the differences .. I found quite few but they are cramped with so much historical information .. I'm interested in things from 2012 and further .. 

 

- What are the different kinds of chipsets / Sockets ?

- How many PCIe Lanes can each chipset support ? 

- What is the processor to chipset mapping for each ?

 

Thanks in Advance .. 

just shooting ahead of the next question here, looking at your specs...AMD does not offer any CPU's that is a worthy upgrade to your current i7-930 so if the aim of all this is to upgrade to a new platform just forget about FM2 or AM3+ and pretend it does not exist.

[adnank77]

Socket AM3+ is AMD's older high-end platform, although it doesn't have a replacement yet.  The chipset of interest here is 990FX, although there is also the 970 chipset which is the lower cost chipset (like Z97 vs H97).  The 990FX chipset provides 38 PCIe 2.0 lanes which puts it on equal footing with Intel in terms of PCIe bandwidth, and the CPUs for it are the FX-8350 and other FX-x3xx series CPUs, and it also supports the older FX-x1xx series chips and the even older Phenom II series.  These CPUs do not have integrated graphics.

 

AMD's more budget oriented platform is for their APUs, which is what they call CPUs with integrated graphics.  The most current is socket FM2+ (F for fusion, since the chips combine a CPU and GPU together), and it supports 5000-7000 series APUs (A10-5800K, A10-6800K, A10-7850K, plus all the lower tier chips like A8, A6, etc.).  The high-end chipset for this socket is A88X.  This platform has 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes, again equal with Intel (their mainstream platform anyway).

 

Thanks for the info .. I'll summarize as bullet points:

 

- The FX Processors are the higher end .. However, their chipset is old and they still run on PCIe 2.0

- AMD's focus is more into APUs .. They have a new chipset that supports PCIe 3.0 .. 

- There is no offerring from AMD that matches the Enthusiast Intel Offering (Ivy Bridge-e) .. They are focusing in competing in mainstream and budget only .. 

 

Did I miss anything ?

[adnank77]

just shooting ahead of the next question here, looking at your specs...AMD does not offer any CPU's that is a worthy upgrade to your current i7-930 so if the aim of all this is to upgrade to a new platform just forget about FM2 or AM3+ and pretend it does not exist.

 

Hi .. 

 

The aim is not to change my system to AMD .. My next upgrade target is X99 Platform ..

 

The aim of the question is to gain knowledge .. many of my friends consult me before buying PC Hardware and I need to know what to advise them .. I'm quite comfortable with Intel's offering but my last AMD CPU experience was in the late 1990s when I built K6 based system. 

[Sintezza]

okay here we go.

 

970 chipset     - 20 pci-e 2.0 lanes configured as x16 X4  only CF capable at 4x

990X chipset   - 20 pci-e 2.0 lanes configured as X16 X8 X4. CF/Sli possible at 8x

990FX chipset - 40 pci-e 2.0 lanes configured as X16 X4 X16 X4 CF/Sli possible at 16x

 

Some 990FX chipset boards can be slighlty diffrent with the lane configurations, depends on the slots availability on the board.

But most Asus boards will be configured as stated above.

 

Do you need more info? just ask

[i_build_nanosuits]

The aim of the question is to gain knowledge .. many of my friends consult me before buying PC Hardware and I need to know what to advise them .. I'm quite comfortable with Intel's offering but my last AMD CPU experience was in the late 1990s when I built K6 based system. 

Fair enough, the Best gaming cpu IMHO that AMD has on the market is the FX-8320. why? one can get this CPU at a very good price and overclocking it will offer very acceptable performance for the price...but you do need a good motherboard with a lot of power phases and a good CPU cooling solution to get high overclocks safely. it's a great chip for video editing or photo editing and 3d rendering anything that use many threads, but the cores (like on EVERY AMD CPU BTW) are somewhat slow by today's standard even at much higher frequencies (GHZ) the cores can't process nowhere near as much instructions as any modern intel CPU, and for games that are CPU intensive and use only a couple heavy main threads (MMO's, RTS...mostly, some indies or older games) it could prove to be fatal and the user will experience at times 12 or 16 FPS during some parts of the gameplay.

 

For that reason, and the fact that the hardware required to succesfully overclock a processor like the FX-8320 or 8350 or even the FX-6300 will end-up costing more money than say a cheap H97 motherboard and a core i5-4460 (wich is a much better quad-core chip for gaming).

 

AMD rocks for low budget builds though, IMHO a quad-core CPU like the Athlon 750K or 760K is awesome value for the money when paired with say a Radeon R9 270 or R9 280 or GTX 760...that makes a good 1080P gaming machine for cheap...provided the user is not a massive MMO' or online RPG and RTS player he should enjoy such a PC.

 

Then, if a lot of those elder sroll online and dota2 or guild wars is going to be played on the machine, a core i3 would be a better CPU choice for the budget build.

[Glenwing]

Thanks for the info .. I'll summarize as bullet points:

 

- The FX Processors are the higher end .. However, their chipset is old and they still run on PCIe 2.0

- AMD's focus is more into APUs .. They have a new chipset that supports PCIe 3.0 .. 

- There is no offerring from AMD that matches the Enthusiast Intel Offering (Ivy Bridge-e) .. They are focusing in competing in mainstream and budget only .. 

 

Did I miss anything ?

 

That sounds about right.  It's worth noting that even though FX uses PCIe 2.0, it has twice as many lanes as their APUs and Intel's chips, so all 3 of those platforms are equal in PCIe bandwidth.

[patrickjp93]

That sounds about right.  It's worth noting that even though FX uses PCIe 2.0, it has twice as many lanes as their APUs and Intel's chips, so all 3 of those platforms are equal in PCIe bandwidth.

FX has more lanes than Intel's MAINSTREAM chips (not socket 2011).

 

Basically FX ~= Intel Socket 2011 in PCIe bandwidth

AMD APUs ~= Intel Socket 115x in PCIe bandwidth

[Glenwing]

FX has more lanes than Intel's MAINSTREAM chips (not socket 2011).

 

Basically FX ~= Intel Socket 2011 in PCIe bandwidth

AMD APUs ~= Intel Socket 115x in PCIe bandwidth

 

I made the distinction in my first post, I just didn't want to add the caveats in parentheses every time I said Intel.  FX has double the lanes of Intel's platform, but each lane provides half the bandwidth (since Intel is using gen3 compared to the gen2 on FX) so Intel's mainstream platform and FX processors are equal in PCIe bandwidth.  16 lanes PCIe 3.0 = 16GB/s (plus 8 PCIe 2.0 aux lanes from the chipset), compared to 32 lanes PCIe 2.0 = 16GB/s (with 6 more PCIe 2.0 lanes for aux functions), all compared to 40 lanes PCIe 3.0 = 40GB/s on socket 2011.