intel i5 4430 vs amd fx 8320

[slitherin96]

my current build sports an fx 8320 at 3.7ghz on an ga78lmt-s2p gigabyte board. Soon a friend will give me his old cpu- the 4430 for free with a motherboard with broken audio and back usb. I was thinking of using that as the media pc, but after upgrading from a 750ti to an r9 290, i noticed that at ultra settings, games like warframe, gta5 and the witcher 2 and 3 stutter quite a lot, because of the awful amd single-core performance. Is the 4th gen i5 better for my gaming needs? Is it worth it to buy a new mobo for the i5, or should simply use front panel solutions? Lastly, since i'm on a very tight budget, is the cooler master hyper t4 good (aka comparable to the 212 evo) for the i5?

[AlTech]

4 minutes ago, slitherin96 said:

my current build sports an fx 8320 at 3.7ghz on an ga78lmt-s2p gigabyte board. Soon a friend will give me his old cpu- the 4430 for free with a motherboard with broken audio and back usb. I was thinking of using that as the media pc, but after upgrading from a 750ti to an r9 290, i noticed that at ultra settings, games like warframe, gta5 and the witcher 2 and 3 stutter quite a lot, because of the awful amd single-core performance. Is the 4th gen i5 better for my gaming needs? Is it worth it to buy a new mobo for the i5, or should simply use front panel solutions? Lastly, since i'm on a very tight budget, is the cooler master hyper t4 good (aka comparable to the 212 evo) for the i5?

Yes the i5 is better for using high end AMD cards (because logic is broken)

[Darel321]

1 minute ago, starcoaster said:

buy a new mobo and go i5, the i5 shits all over that 8320

soo. you're saying that i5 non k, with 3 GHz base, 4 cores is better than fx 8 cores and probably oc to 4,5 GHz ? interesting

[wyattzx]

I would invest in a motherboard for the i5-4430, and definitely use it over your FX-8320. Even though it's a Z97 board, and your chip is not overclockable, the MSi Z97s SLi Krait Edition is a great board with a nice white aesthetic that is priced competitively. 

[comicsansms]

They preform so similarly, I don't think it is worth it.

The i5 will have better single core performance, but the FX will win in tasks that use 8 cores.

I don't think either CPUs can handle a R9 290 well.

[wyattzx]

2 minutes ago, Darel321 said:

soo. you're saying that i5 non k, with 3 GHz base, 4 cores is better than fx 8 cores and probably oc to 4,5 GHz ? interesting

Yes the i5-4430 is faster and better than the FX-8320 in almost every regard. Temperatures, per-core performance, even rendering in some cases. There are almost no reasons to buy an FX chip anymore.

[Glenwing]

1 minute ago, Darel321 said:

soo. you're saying that i5 non k, with 3 GHz base, 4 cores is better than fx 8 cores and probably oc to 4,5 GHz ? interesting

Yes, it is. You can beat an overclocked FX-8320 with a mildly overclocked Sandy Bridge quad-core, and even a locked Haswell i5 will be at least equivalent to that.

[Hiebly]

14 minutes ago, starcoaster said:

The AMD chip is NOT an 8 core, it is 4 core blocks with 2 ALU's each, making a total of 8 ALU's.

While it's true that the FX-8xxx series aren't exactly true eight-cores, I wish people would stop making this a primary point of contention. Scalability isn't an issue on the FX-8350... purely comparing the difference between what can be done with one of its "cores" and eight of them, it's basically an eight-core. The problem isn't that it's more like a quad-core, the problem is that the cores are garbage and slow as hell

Like a program that will actually use eight threads does quite well on them. Still not better than an i5 in most cases, but that isn't due to the eight cores not being eight independent cores, it's due to the IPC being poop.

[Hiebly]

Just now, starcoaster said:

tbh it's more like a 6.5 core based on observations from running a CPU with a similar architecture

until Zen, it's not worth it, i5 all the way

I'm not suggesting it's worth it. I don't think there's any scenario where the FX CPU makes sense as a purchase anymore. I just don't like people arguing about whether it's an eight core because for practical sense it is an eight-core... the pitfall of it is it has the IPC of the Core 2 series of CPUs from 2007 lol.

[s3ns3]

yes the i5 is a lot better for your gaming needs. even an i3 is better