Keep it or Swap it?

[A-v-Dee]

I have recently (3months ago) bought a MSI 990FXA-Gaming motherboard for some overclocking on my 8350 to make it last well enough till Zen comes out.

 

I was wondering.. should i keep doing what i am doing now and wait to see what AMD does over the next 2 years (I hope my 8350 will last that long gaming wise) or..

should i save up.. Sell the board and CPU (Still have all boxes and manuals) and swap it for a good Intel CPU and board?

 

If the answer is swapping to intel, what is the best i can get for around 350-450 EUROS (about 500 Dollars i guess)?

 

Thanks in advance.

[Nacho Marco Segui]

But,do you need to switch?

[Morgan MLGman]

Watch it and then decide for yourself:

JayzTwoCents went from FX-8350 @4,8ghz to an i7-3770k @4,8ghz and tells you if there's a difference and if it's worth it.

[Dobbsjr]

 

IMO, swapping to Intel would be the better choice now.  We have no idea if Zen will live up to it's expectations. The best platform for $500 would probably be z97 with 4790k.

[A-v-Dee]

But,do you need to switch?

 

I do not NEED to switch, i play every game just fine at High settings 1080 60FPS.. (Not Arma/Dayz since that works better on Intel i guess).

 

But since i have been active on this forum i only hear BAD shit about AMD when it comes to it performing against even the lower tier Intel chips..

 

So thats why i was wondering if it really is so bad to have a 8350 instead of a decent i5 or i7.

[runit3]

I do not NEED to switch, i play every game just fine at High settings 1080 60FPS.. (Not Arma/Dayz since that works better on Intel i guess).

 

But since i have been active on this forum i only hear BAD shit about AMD when it comes to it performing against even the lower tier Intel chips..

 

So thats why i was wondering if it really is so bad to have a 8350 instead of a decent i5 or i7.

If you're happy with the performance, you're happy with the performance. Shouldn't matter what anyone says/believes, people may point out that it was a poor choice (which it was) but that shouldn't change your stance that for you AMD hardware works.

 

A good friend of mine at work has 2 AMD FX systems, which I happily point out as boggling my mind given his expertise with most things electronic, but his main point was that he was happy with the performance of his system and he had fun building it, he could give two shits about what anyone else thought.

[Dobbsjr]

I do not NEED to switch, i play every game just fine at High settings 1080 60FPS.. (Not Arma/Dayz since that works better on Intel i guess).

 

But since i have been active on this forum i only hear BAD shit about AMD when it comes to it performing against even the lower tier Intel chips..

 

So thats why i was wondering if it really is so bad to have a 8350 instead of a decent i5 or i7.

If you're getting a playable result than it's not bad at all.

[A-v-Dee]

People may point out that it was a poor choice (which it was) but that shouldn't change your stance that for you AMD hardware works.

 

You are absolutely right, thanks for the advice.. For now it works fine for me, just doing some gaming and live streaming.

 

Let me clarify that i bought the FX8350 about 3 years ago, i loved it since i never had a decent computer and saved up for it for a while to build.

So if it was a bad choice.. It probably was.. i'm not sure but i still love the little machine today.

 

I will just keep it and see what AMD has to offer in the next 2 years.

 

Anything that works well with intel (Game wise) i can just do on my laptop.. it rocks a i7 5700HQ with a GTX960M playing Arma 3 at 60FPS.

 

Thanks again for your advice and making up my mind !

[Benji_w]

You are absolutely right, thanks for the advice.. For now it works fine for me, just doing some gaming and live streaming.

 

Let me clarify that i bought the FX8350 about 3 years ago, i loved it since i never had a decent computer and saved up for it for a while to build.

So if it was a bad choice.. It probably was.. i'm not sure but i still love the little machine today.

 

I will just keep it and see what AMD has to offer in the next 2 years.

 

Anything that works well with intel (Game wise) i can just do on my laptop.. it rocks a i7 5700HQ with a GTX960M playing Arma 3 at 60FPS.

 

Thanks again for your advice and making up my mind !

 

Just overclock it and play your games, it's what I do. My friend has an intel rig with an i7 in and in most games i'm only a few FPS behind him so I could care less. I have an intel build to do in january and a the gf has a skylake build also. Still use my AMD like a champ.

 

PS.. 3 years ago the 8350 was neck and neck with the intel at the time.

 

[runit3]

-snip-

3 years ago it was a bit more compelling as a choice depending on your workload.

 

I routinely make very questionable choices around my main rig (i7-980X and i7-5960X) honestly surprised I don't get more flak for it around here. Spending $1000 on a CPU is completely idiotic given I could build 2 5820k systems for that, and have one system offloaded as a dedicated render rig. But I 1) don't care 2) love the chips 3) after I make them last for 5 years they make GREAT presents for people still rocking laptops or deprecated dual core gaming rigs.

[Benji_w]

3 years ago it was a bit more compelling as a choice depending on your workload.

 

I routinely make very questionable choices around my main rig (i7-980X and i7-5960X) honestly surprised I don't get more flak for it around here. Spending $1000 on a CPU is completely idiotic given I could build 2 5820k systems for that, and have one system offloaded as a dedicated render rig. But I 1) don't care 2) love the chips 3) after I make them last for 5 years they make GREAT presents for people still rocking laptops or deprecated dual core gaming rigs.

 

Buy what you like, there is usually a reason to the purchase, either budget or performance. An FX can still game pretty well when overclocked so meh, I too would buy a 5960x if funds permitted, then again if I had the cash when I originally bought my pc parts I'd have an i7 extreme cpu anyway. 

[DunePilot]

Wait and upgrade your MONITOR first. Give it a year or two and let monitors and DX12 and such mature, spend the big boy bucks after you've saved a couple years on a nice monitor whatever the hot $800-1200 shebang is out by then. Then upgrade the PC to provide the horsepower to push it. 

[runit3]

Buy what you like, there is usually a reason to the purchase, either budget or performance. An FX can still game pretty well when overclocked so meh, I too would buy a 5960x if funds permitted, then again if I had the cash when I originally bought my pc parts I'd have an i7 extreme cpu anyway. 

I've been tempted to buy an FX-8 simply due to the overclocking procedure necessary for them. I miss the days of overclocking via FSB/NB/QPI from my X58, was a hell of a lot more challenging than, "set it to 1.35v, max mult, make fail". On this forum I'm way more likely to give someone shit who bought a K sku for not overclocking or underclocking (makes my head implode) than someone who buys an FX and OC's the piss out of it.

 

With locked Skylake parts now being able to be OC'd, people suggesting FX builds for gaming may irk me quite a bit more, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it, and after I experience locked Skylake OCing (tentatively planning an i3-6100 build).

[DunePilot]

X58 is by far the most awesome systems I have played with. Gotta agree with Runit3. I think it's really cool that some folks have figured out how to OC locked chips on the newer platforms using the SeaMicro boards using BCLK in the last few weeks and apparently it has prompted a few other manufacturers to update BIOS with the same feature unlocked. There was a thread here should be on the first page or two of someone doing it on an ASRock with some beta BIOS. That shows the other guys are worried and want their cut of the market share. More power to them, Intel shouldn't be locking stuff anyways just because AMD has been behind the curve. 

[Benji_w]

I've been tempted to buy an FX-8 simply due to the overclocking procedure necessary for them. I miss the days of overclocking via FSB/NB/QPI from my X58, was a hell of a lot more challenging than, "set it to 1.35v, max mult, make fail". On this forum I'm way more likely to give someone shit who bought a K sku for not overclocking or underclocking (makes my head implode) than someone who buys an FX and OC's the piss out of it.

 

With locked Skylake parts now being able to be OC'd, people suggesting FX builds for gaming may irk me quite a bit more, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it, and after I experience locked Skylake OCing (tentatively planning an i3-6100 build).

 

 

Given most people don't tune their ram in correctly I highly doubt them modding bios to unlock i3 chips is on their level. It pisses me off when people buy expensive parts then don't push them because they're scared of breaking it. MATE YOU JUST SPENT £600+ ON A GPU, CLOCK THAT BASTARD!!! If you own an unlocked cpu and clocking board and you're not overclocking... there is a special place in hell for you, stop fucking breathing my air.

 

As more programs etc start using more cores, buying multi core cpus will make more sense. Don't even get me started on Valley benchmark only using one core to render....

[blu4]

Watch it and then decide for yourself:

JayzTwoCents went from FX-8350 @4,8ghz to an i7-3770k @4,8ghz and tells you if there's a difference and if it's worth it.

A video from two years back makes no sense now. With modern GPUs- anything up from a 970, the FX lineup is shit.

[Morgan MLGman]

A video from two years back makes no sense now. With modern GPUs- anything up from a 970, the FX lineup is shit.

You clearly have no first hand experience, therefore you shouldn't really state invalid opinions cause they spread misinformation.

[DunePilot]

Is he stating modern GPUs are useless with older platforms? That is very false info... I smoke a lot of newer top end systems with a 4 year old chip on a 1366 socket which came out in 2008.... there is definitely faster stuff, Skylake for one has faster single core performance but I still beat it with multicore benches. Two year old gear is nothing... absolutely does not make it irrelevant or useless to pair with new GPUs. 

 

Fire Strike - Overall 17259 Graphics 21346 http://www.3dmark.com/fs/6044454 on LGA 1366 x58 Motherboard

[blu4]

You clearly have no first hand experience, therefore you shouldn't really state invalid opinions cause they spread misinformation.

I just happened to have a FX CPU, now have an Intel platform. FX lineup is okay for light to medium gaming but when it comes to high end commuters, the FX crumbles. That's one of the reasons why people who benchmark anything use a Intel CPU, not AMD. The FX in your case is a very good pair for the 290X, anything up from that you might start to suffer. More and more games are starting to leverage more CPU horsepower- a good example of that is Fallout 4 where an i5 is heavily used and the FX is just a big bottleneck.

 

A good example is here-

 

So the FX is still a good chip?

 

Furthermore, if you're going to judge people without having a look yourself first, you will end up looking like an idiot. As I said, referencing a video or anything computer related, going back two years is not a good idea since a lot of things change over the years.

[Benji_w]

A video from two years back makes no sense now. With modern GPUs- anything up from a 970, the FX lineup is shit.

 

Sorry but I disagree, my card is 100 points or so behind a intel chip on Valley benchmark because it's weaker on single core performance. 

 

 

Bottle neck? Yeah so what, it isn't noticeable in games where my GPU sits pretty at 95-99% usage.

[Morgan MLGman]

-snip-

Eh, let me begin saying that referring Fallout 4 with any benchmarks or performance related stuff is silly cause we all know this game has issues and it's not a reliable source, cause I've seen benchmarks of Fallout 4 where the FX-8350 was faster than a 4670k (link: http://gamegpu.ru/images/remote/http--www.gamegpu.ru-images-stories-Test_GPU-RPG-Fallout_4-test-proz.jpg)

2. Benchmarking CPUs @1440p seems a bit unrealistic don't you think?

3. the FX-8300 series is good for triple-A gaming and going from that to intel 3rd-4th gen CPUs will not bring performance improvements compared to the money you need to pay to upgrade. That is exactly what Jay said, there might be a couple of frames difference, benchmarks will run better, but you're not gaining anything in the real world that's even close to the cost of that upgrade.

4. If he already has the 8350 it's not worth upgrading now cause it's perfectly capable of gaming and I've paired mine with a GTX 970, now with a R9 290X which is faster (Actually surpassed GTX 980 scores in some benchmarks after I OC'd it) and I can tell you that if a game is optimized to use 4threads and above, I've never seen it bottleneck the GPU.

The 8350 is faster than even an i5-4690k in some specific cases. An i5-4460 is much more likely to bottleneck in a CPU heavy game than a 8350 for instance cause it's less powerful, even up to 61% slower across all threads.

[Benji_w]

A load of misinformation....

 

Oh hahaha, well done on picking the benchmark where the 9590 thermal throttled all the way through the test. Can we stop taking benchmarks like they're written in stone, especially when the person doing the testing is absolutely fucking clueless and isn't monitoring temps?

 

[runit3]

The 8350 is faster than even an i5-4690k in some specific cases. An i5-4460 is much more likely to bottleneck in a CPU heavy game than a 8350 for instance cause it's less powerful, even up to 61% slower across all threads.

Agree with everything else you said in that post, besides this. Where are you coming up with 61% slower across all threads? Clock:Clock Core:Core any FX-8 chip is 30-40% less powerful than any Haswell chip due to IPC difference. That would be like claiming an i5-2500 is more powerful than an i5-4690.

 

A Haswell chip of nearly any variety (Dual Core and some i3's excluded) is much less likely to neck a card at any resolution lower than 1080p than any FX chip, what you're saying is completely nonsensical (fairly certain you already know that). I don't have time to hunt down the multitudes of benchmarks proving that, nor do I feel like C&Ping multiple LTT member's conglomerated posts on the subject.

 

The larger point of this thread, and where the argument really holds ground on the FX-8 line, is just how much that bottlenecking really matters at 1080p. The answer being that in 9/10 cases it doesn't mean a damn thing to most users and most games where the bottlenecking threshold for performance decrease at 1080p is a maximum of 10-15FPS, often times over 60fps, where a 60Hz monitor will likely never display the problem.

[blu4]

 Benchmarking CPUs @1440p seems a bit unrealistic don't you think?

So how the fuck do you measure GPU performance at 1440p without a CPU? It is entirely realistic. Can you believe that people benchmarks CPUs at 4K too?

 

Oh hahaha, well done on picking the benchmark where the 9590 thermal throttled all the way through the test. Can we stop taking benchmarks like they're written in stone, especially when the person doing the testing is absolutely fucking clueless and isn't monitoring temps?

 

A legit Russian website running a 980ti benchmark at 1280x720? Mate... Who are you trying to convince?

[runit3]

So how the fuck do you measure GPU performance at 1440p without a CPU? It is entirely realistic. Can you believe that people benchmarks CPUs at 4K too?

 

A legit Russian website running a 980ti benchmark at 1280x720? Mate... Who are you trying to convince?

I believe his larger point was that at a higher resolution less load is experienced by the CPU, making it more of a GPU dependent benchmark rather than a CPU dependent bench.

 

That same Russian website has had some dubious results for multiple games/systems. He is right about FO4, game is a shit optimized console port.

 

You can't use one game and one site to support a fact. This is coming from a Wintel guy.

 

You're both wrong and you're both right. This thread is rapidly devolving into another bullshit flamewar