Has fx ever been a truly "better" option?

[ImNotThere]

obviously with the whole ryzen vs kaby lake thing having clear "benefits" to either i was wondering has the fx range ever truly been competitive as a good 6/8 core on a budget?

[MysticalRainXIV]

1 minute ago, ImNotThere said:

<Snip>

before ryzen yes all the way, and with dx12 and vulkan they've seemed to make a bit of a comeback in performance, but I'd still buy ryzen on a budget these days.

 

[manikyath]

FX was appareantly pretty dope for streaming back when it first came out.. and was then milked for 5 years..

 

in terms of usefullness outside of that.. FX was a bit ahead of its time for the desktop, IMO it should have been a server part.

[ImNotThere]

Just now, MysticalRainXIV said:

before ryzen yes all the way, and with dx12 and vulkan they've seemed to make a bit of a comeback in performance, but I'd still buy ryzen on a budget these days.

 

im talking like way pre ryzen, like haswell days for intel

[MysticalRainXIV]

Just now, ImNotThere said:

im talking like way pre ryzen, like haswell days for intel

a very relevant option at the time. my first budget build was a fx-4300. it was dirt cheap and could get through the games i needed it to. the FX platform was a fantastic budget option, and still can be

[ImNotThere]

2 minutes ago, manikyath said:

FX was appareantly pretty dope for streaming back when it first came out.. and was then milked for 5 years..

 

in terms of usefullness outside of that.. FX was a bit ahead of its time for the desktop, IMO it should have been a server part.

was curious because one of my friends has a 6300 and he says that the 6 physical cores on that is faster than the 6 physical cores on my r5 1600 lmao and that if i disabled smt i would be ruined

[Emberstone]

1 minute ago, ImNotThere said:

was curious because one of my friends has a 6300 and he says that the 6 physical cores on that is faster than the 6 physical cores on my r5 1600 lmao and that if i disabled smt i would be ruined

"Look at all my gigahertz bruh!"

 

That's adorable. You two should duke it out in Cinebench. With SMT off. Lol.

[ImNotThere]

Just now, Emberstone said:

"Look at all my gigahertz bruh!"

 

That's adorable.

it truly was haha, i feel bad looking at his cinnebench score

[MysticalRainXIV]

Just now, ImNotThere said:

was curious because one of my friends has a 6300 and he says that the 6 physical cores on that is faster than the 6 physical cores on my r5 1600 lmao and that if i disabled smt i would be ruined

well theyre talking out of their ass. The FX series cores share FPUs between the two of them, nuking the IPC's of the processors or modules as they were called. Ryzen is only ~15% or so behind in IPCs of intels current gen, and even if you disabled SMT you would smack the 6300 in cinebench

[tp95112]

There was a time where it competed against 3570k head to head really well. Teksyndicate published a video that showed it was good contender vs Intel. Even Linus posted a bunch of videos comparing them in w7 to w8 and multiple other benchmarks

[Enderman]

When ryzen didn't exist it was sometimes a better option than an i5 for rendering and other multithreaded stuff.

An i7 was much more expensive.

[8-Bit Ninja]

6 minutes ago, ImNotThere said:

it truly was haha, i feel bad looking at his cinnebench score

As people said, back in the day it was a fantastic processor for the money, sorta like how ryzen 7 is right now, great for video editors, streamers etc.. who couldn't afford intels "extreme" processors 

[ARikozuM]

For the price-performance, it was awesome, but Intel had better chips if you were willing to pay for them. 

[DocSwag]

Back a few years ago if you needed multi threaded performance then it was a great deal. Though the single threaded performance was pretty behind.

[Princess Luna]

It was the best space heater at the market back in the golden days for the 9590

[Nena Trinity]

FX-6300 is minimum for BF1 and I say its still a good chip until you try games like Arma... o3o

 

Edit: Arma does not really use more CPU it just hammers 1-core!

[Ordinarily_Greater]

FX CPUs are hot I think, AAA cooler is needed that time. I don't know if AMD was late on trying DDR4 but I think the 9590 CPU is so amazing that before Ryzen exists I thought it can be the choice for my old Intel LGA 775 upgrade

[AnonymousGuy]

You'd have to go back something like 5 years to find when it was somewhat competitive, but only in multithreaded workloads.  Then it got progressively less competitive until basically a dual core overclocked Kaby could beat a top end FX....it was a joke.

 

Oh and it was literally a joke that they tried to sell them as 8 cores.

 

Kinda a repeat of now.  Ryzen is better multithreaded like FX was, and they're planning on milking Zen for the next 3 years.

[Phate.exe]

8 minutes ago, AnonymousGuy said:

Kinda a repeat of now.  Ryzen is better multithreaded like FX was, and they're planning on milking Zen for the next 3 years.

Except Ryzen is actually not far behind *lake chips in IPC at all.  Like close enough that you won't really notice unless you're running 4.2+ GHz and really only load a couple of threads.

 

FX was laughably behind in single-threaded performance.  It wasn't actually "good" at all in that regard.  Things got better by the time excavator came around, but it still wasn't great.

 

Ryzen does just fine in single thread, and has pretty much destroyed the case for locked i5 and i7 sku's by near-enough to matching the single threaded performance while offering way more threads for less money.

[ARikozuM]

3 minutes ago, Phate.exe said:

Ryzen does just fine in single thread, and has pretty much destroyed the case for locked i5 and i7 sku's by near-enough to matching the single threaded performance while offering way more threads for less money.

In most tests, Ryzen has a memory advantage with OC while Intel is used with stock. Gaming benchmarks usually show the i5 matching and exceeding performance for average and losing minimums by a few percent (about 4%).

[HelplmChoking]

My FX was great for a low-budget 3d rendering machine a few years back, but I found a Xeon for an awesome price and double the thread count.

 

50 minutes ago, Ordinarily_Greater said:

FX CPUs are hot I think, AAA cooler is needed that time. I don't know if AMD was late on trying DDR4 but I think the 9590 CPU is so amazing that before Ryzen exists I thought it can be the choice for my old Intel LGA 775 upgrade

The 9590 was a nightmare, but most of the FX line really weren't that hot. My 8320 @4.2GHz ran in the high 50's with just a 212 EVO with like a 20 ambient, and that was under load. The only problem is AMD gave it a really low max temp (65 ish) which meant that, although it wasn't that hot, it wasn't ideal for the chip.

[Suika]

In workloads that would utilize the threads, yes, it was very competitive, but, at least at the time, gaming was extremely single threaded, which the FX lacked. 

 

I generally recommended never going for the AM3+ platform, as you could spend only a bit more and get a Xeon E3 with hyperthreading, which destroyed Bulldozer chips. 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

44 minutes ago, AnonymousGuy said:

You'd have to go back something like 5 years to find when it was somewhat competitive, but only in multithreaded workloads.  Then it got progressively less competitive until basically a dual core overclocked Kaby could beat a top end FX....it was a joke.

Err... No, that never happened. The "dual core vs FX" you are talking abut is purely single-threaded performance. gaming, etc.

For multithreaded applications, FX remained competitive throughout, as prices continue to decrease. Two years ago all you could get for FX-8350 prices was a (locked) Haswell i5, which had significantly lower multithreaded performance. It just wasn't as good for gaming, and there isn't a huge market for multithreaded applications. And eventually performance/$ isn't as important when both performance and $ get low enough compared to alternatives. But with Intel's pricing, it wasn't until Ryzen's release that FX stopped being the best budget multithreaded option.

It was a shame htey never brought Excavator to AM3+, but I guess it wasn't worth the cost for AMD.

Quote

Oh and it was literally a joke that they tried to sell them as 8 cores.

Nah, not really. It was a hampered 8-core due to the existence of some shared resources, but 8-core describes it much better than calling it 4-core (the msot accurate would be to call it a 4-module, but nobody would understand what it means).

It is much more of a joke how Intel and AMD prominently advertise the "number of threads" these days, which continues to confuse and mislead consumer to this day. SMT should just be lumped somewhere with thinks like the SSE version and whatnot.

 

 

4 hours ago, MysticalRainXIV said:

The FX series cores share FPUs between the two of them, nuking the IPC's of the processors or modules as they were called.

CMT isn't the reason the IPC is low - sharing the FPU would have no impact on single-threaded use cases, and the IPC is low compared to Intel post-Sandy Bridge even there. On the contrary, shared FPUs is detrimental to multithreaded performance, where it excelled anyway in budget-sensitive scenarios due to Intel's high pricing of high core-count CPUs.

 

In any case, yes, there is no comparison between 6 FX cores vs 6 Ryzen cores.

[Jito463]

3 hours ago, Rangaman42 said:

The 9590 was a nightmare, but most of the FX line really weren't that hot. My 8320 @4.2GHz ran in the high 50's with just a 212 EVO with like a 20 ambient, and that was under load. The only problem is AMD gave it a really low max temp (65 ish) which meant that, although it wasn't that hot, it wasn't ideal for the chip.

When I ran my FX-8370 system (at the stock 4GHz), I usually let the CPU throttle down while idle or in general daily computer use (i.e. not gaming).  CoreTemp reported my CPU at around 17-20 Celsius on the stock cooler.

 

And by stock cooler, I mean like this one below (like what came with the Phenom II's), not the aluminum one with the little 60mm fan.  I never got those people who complained about the FX running hot, though I can certainly see how the 9590 certainly would have.

 

Spoiler

 

[LienusLateTips]

7 hours ago, ImNotThere said:

im talking like way pre ryzen, like haswell days for intel

Remember when  FX 6300 was better than Intel i3... sighhh