Will the FX6300 bottleneck a R9 280X?

[Faceman]

I do live near a microcenter! Perhaps I should do this... Let me investigate a bit more. But regarding your comment "Games don't need many cores"

If games don't need many cores, why do companies such as Intel keep making CPUs with more cores such as the i7 5790k with like 8 cores? Shouldn't they just focus on making their cores more powerful like you just stated above?

Those "super processors" aren't for gamers. They are for work. Even the i7 which is a 4 core 8 thread processor doesn't provide increased performance over an i5. Its all about strong cores for games.

Good point, I'm definitely considering it now...

[Faa]

If games don't need many cores, why do companies such as Intel keep making CPUs with more cores such as the i7 5790k with like 8 cores? Shouldn't they just focus on making their cores more powerful like you just stated above?

More singlethreaded performance requires a new architecture, AMD doesn't even have the budget for R&D like Intel does and they can't compete with Intel on single threaded performance anymore so they just compete with Intel with multithreaded performance instead. Putting more cores in a CPU is as easy as installing more GPU's in your system. And yes CPU monopoly these days is pretty much all about single threaded performance, combining that with low power consumption is a win - hence why you see Intels 8 core outperforming a 9590 up to 150%. They're not going to give you more cores because games need them, doesn't work like that at all. Putting a 5960x's multithreaded performance into one single core would be billion times better for gaming than the current state of a 5960x.

Just noticed, if BF4/Civ 5 are your primary games, well a 6300 will do better than a G3258 in BF4 though, in Civ5/WoW the G3258 would do.