i3+ 970?

[Untouchable]

Hello everybody! I was just scrolling through the forums and came across an article concerning AMDs AM3/AM3+ socket. I have now learned that the socket is dead, quite foolish of me to figure this out now.  Regardless, I am ditching my old plan of upgrading to a higher tier AMD socket and instead opting to go with the lga 1150 socket. My question i suppose is... Should I wait and save my pennies for an i5 or shall I just buy an i3 and upgrade later to an i5? No matter what cpu I get i am still purchasing a gtx 970. Thank you everybody. 

[Swndlr]

i5 now

[vlkn´]

I would save it. Spending some good quality time with gpu heavy games like metro 2033.

[Faceman]

i5.

 

An i3 is not a bad CPU, but get a locked i5 at least and you will be much happier.

 

Check out this video by Austin Evans comparing an i3 to an i5 using a GTX780.  You can see the 780 is being held back by the i3 in some games.

 

[Untouchable]

i5.

 

An i3 is not a bad CPU, but get a locked i5 at least and you will be much happier.

 

Check out this video by Austin Evans comparing an i3 to an i5 using a GTX780.  You can see the 780 is being held back by the i3 in some games.

 

Thank you for the video. Is a gtx 780 not worse than a gtx 970? I thought that you go up 90 and that is what your last generation card is equal to in the new generation of products. Anyway, I have seen numerous benchmarks in which the gtx 780 outperforms the 970.

[vlkn´]

Performance is about the same, a bit lower performance with the 780. 

But my main reason why I would switch to a 970 is that it consumes less power and stays more cool.

[Arty]

same games don't dual core very well

[TheRetiredSlave]

What do you mean by "AM3+ is dead"? (BTW, that's rhetorical, I know exactly what you mean). How "alive" do you think LGA1150 is? We can pretty much guarantee that Skylake will come with a new socket, and we already have a pretty good idea that the per-clock performance difference between Haswell and Broadwell will be minimal (~3% ?). Chances are, if you buy a Haswell CPU now, you're probably not going to upgrade it anyway, so how "alive" is LGA1150 to you?

 

That being said, if you can stretch your budget to include an i5 (any i5), that would be good idea for gaming. If price is too much of an issue, the FX 6300 is very affordable and generally performs better than an i3. Edit: Or not. I was apparently either misremembering benchmarks results or thinking of outdated benchmarks. Regardless, FX 6300 is still very affordable, it can be OC'd fairly decently, and can perform better than an i3 in heavily multithreaded tasks. That being said, most games still prefer single-threaded performance (in which Intel CPUs are substantially better), so an i5 or an i3 would be a better choice.

[Untouchable]

Performance is about the same, a bit lower performance with the 780. 

But my main reason why I would switch to a 970 is that it consumes less power and stays more cool.

Ok. So now since the gtx 970 requires a minimum psu of 500w, I have to upgrade my cpu, motherboard, psu, and if upgrading to an i5, a cpu cooler as well. this is becoming a very expensive upgrade. 

[vlkn´]

Ok. So now since the gtx 970 requires a minimum psu of 500w, I have to upgrade my cpu, motherboard, psu, and if upgrading to an i5, a cpu cooler as well. this is becoming a very expensive upgrade. 

It is #I need money

 

[TheRetiredSlave]

Ok. So now since the gtx 970 requires a minimum psu of 500w, I have to upgrade my cpu, motherboard, psu, and if upgrading to an i5, a cpu cooler as well. this is becoming a very expensive upgrade. 

 

Two questions: 

What do you have right now?

What's your budget?

 

Also: If you're not overclocking, an aftermarket cooler is unnecessary. I built a rig for my Dad which had an i5-4590 using the stock cooler (in an mATX chassis with poor airflow), and even after an hour of stress testing, the stock cooler was both very quiet and kept temperatures within a safe range. Of course, the temperatures weren't super low, but they never reached unsafe levels and the CPU never throttled.

If you're gaming, the CPU won't be pinned to 100% load on all cores (like I had done with the stress test), so the stock cooler should be more than sufficient.

[d33g33]

Why not grab the Anniversary version of the G3258 and overclock the snot out of it

[thatguyjerry]

Why not grab the Anniversary version of the G3258 and overclock the snot out of it

wouldn't an i3 perform better than the pentiumk paired with the 970?

[Faceman]

What do you mean by "AM3+ is dead"? (BTW, that's rhetorical, I know exactly what you mean). How "alive" do you think LGA1150 is? We can pretty much guarantee that Skylake will come with a new socket, and we already have a pretty good idea that the per-clock performance difference between Haswell and Broadwell will be minimal (~3% ?). Chances are, if you buy a Haswell CPU now, you're probably not going to upgrade it anyway, so how "alive" is LGA1150 to you?

 

That being said, if you can stretch your budget to include an i5 (any i5), that would be good idea for gaming. If price is too much of an issue, the FX 6300 is very affordable and generally performs better than an i3.

AM3+ is a dead socket meaning it its performance in games is atrocious.  It is a very old platform, while the LGA1150 is also being cycled out, it is not nearly as dead as AM3+, and offers a much more modern experience.  At least with Intel, you have an upgrade path.  You could start with an i3, which will beat an FX6 in 99% of games, even an FX8 in a lot of games, you have the option to upgrade to an i5,i7, or Xeon. Upgrading on the FX platform won't do much for you.  The same games that an FX6 struggles in, so will an FX8 and 9. 

 

I agree that an i5 is the best option, but AM3+ is not the answer for gaming.

 

 

Benchmarks:

http://www.hardcorew...-4340-review/2/

http://www.hardwarep...8-games-tested/

http://www.tomshardw...cpu,3929-7.html

http://www.anandtech...w-vishera-95w/3

http://techreport.com/review/23750/amd-fx-8350-processor-reviewed/14

 

 

"To put it nicely, the FX-8370E is a true middle-of-the-road CPU. Using it only makes sense as long as the graphics card you choose comes from a similar performance segment.

Depending on the game in question, AMD’s new processor has the potential to keep you happy around the AMD Radeon R9 270X/285 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 760 or 660 Ti level.

A higher- or even high-end graphics card doesn’t make sense, as pairing it with AMD's FX-8370E simply limits the card's potential."

 

"This is a huge result – it wasn’t until we used a Haswell core CPU that the R9 280X  was able to deliver consistent frame times and a 60 FPS frame rate in Assassin’s Creed IV. All three AMD CPUs we used – even the FX 8350 – and the Ivy Bridge Core i3 would deliver a sub 60 FPS frame rate, with frame spikes throughout the benchmark run.

In this case, the Core i3 4340 allows the R9 280X GPU to run at maximum potential, just like the Core i5 (and Core i7 would)."

 

"Pop over to the gaming scatter, though, and the picture changes dramatically. There, the FX-8350 is the highest-performance AMD desktop processor to date for gaming, finally toppling the venerable Phenom II X4 980. Yet the FX-8350's gaming performance almost exactly matches that of the Core i3-3225, a $134 Ivy Bridge-based processor. Meanwhile, the Core i5-3470 delivers markedly superior gaming performance for less money than the FX-8350. The FX-8350 isn't exactly bad for video games—its performance was generally acceptable in our tests. But it is relatively weak compared to the competition.

This strange divergence between the two performance pictures isn't just confined to gaming, of course. The FX-8350 is also relatively pokey in image processing applications, in SunSpider, and in the less widely multithreaded portions of our video encoding tests. Many of these scenarios rely on one or several threads, and the FX-8350 suffers compared to recent Intel chips in such cases. Still, the contrast between the FX-8350 and the Sandy/Ivy Bridge chips isn't nearly as acute as it was with the older FX processors. Piledriver's IPC gains and that 4GHz base clock have taken the edge off of our objections.

The other major consideration here is power consumption, and really, the FX-8350 isn't even the same class of product as the Ivy Bridge Core i5 processors on this front. There's a 48W gap between the TDP ratings of the Core i5 parts and the FX-8350, but in our tests, the actual difference at the wall socket between two similarly configured systems under load was over 100W. That gap is large enough to force the potential buyer to think deeply about the class of power supply, case, and CPU cooler he needs for his build. One could definitely get away with less expensive components for a Core i5 system."

 

"The FX-8370E stretches its legs a little in terms of minimum frame rates, particularly in SLI, however it is handily beaten by the i3-4330."

 

"Average frametimes did not do AMD’s processors any justice either. As we already said the game was fluid with i7 and i5’s, and somewhat playable with the i3 processor line. When we switched to FX CPUs not only did we have worse framerate but the gameplay was simply put, laggy."

[Abdulrahman]

You should save up for an i5, but you can always go with a 8 core AMD CPU. A friend got one and their performance for the price is actually impressive. 

 

A used CPU/Motherboard combo can also be a good option.

[dragoon20005]

You should save up for and i5, but you can always go with a 8 core AMD CPU. A friend got one and their performance for the price is actually impressive.

sorry friend

 

the FX has reached its end of life 

 

the Haswell has pretty much dominated most new PC build

[Abdulrahman]

wouldn't an i3 perform better than the pentiumk paired with the 970?

If you overclock the G3258, you can get very high performance from it. Linus did a video comparing an overclocked G3258 with a i7.

[That Norwegian Guy]

Thank you for the video. Is a gtx 780 not worse than a gtx 970?

 

It's a bit of an asymmetrical comparison.

 

The GPU is slightly more powerful and power efficient on the 970, but the 780 can fill 3GB of frame buffer faster due to a wider memory bus. For 1440p, it's not uncommon to see the 780 pull ahead a little in short burst tests. But in sustained tests, and in cases where more than 3GB of VRAM is used, the 970 equalizes the very small advantage and pulls ahead.

[Untouchable]

Why not grab the Anniversary version of the G3258 and overclock the snot out of it

I keep thinking I should do that. Probably going to get a good motherboard and upgrade later to more than the G3258 after I get it. Thank you!