AM3+ Gen CPU - To update, or not to update ?

[Normand_Nadon]

Hey guys (and girls of course!),

 

I want your opinion... Please don't troll or fight over this, it is a genuine question I have. I searched the Internet for answers on this but no one seems to agree on this...

 

With the launch of RyZen, most previous gen CPUs have gone down in price.

I actually run a 1100t 3.3GHz (3.7 boost) 6 cores Thuban processor and it is super solid and fast enough for my current and probably near future needs.

My RAM is Corsair 4 x 4Gb, (total 16Gb) clocked at 1600MHz... Max that CPU can take at stock speeds from what I know

 

The FX-8370 has lowered in price to around 180 $ Canadian... This CPU is a "low" TDP 8 cores that clocks at 4GHz (4,3 boost)

They are both 125W TDP CPUs but appart from raw speed, would there be other avantages to upgrade to such a CPU?

Does it have future proofing technologies that the Thuban does not?

 

Also, would upgrading to 1866MHz RAM make a real difference? 

(BTW, board can take it, Gigabyte 990-FXA-UD7 rev.1)

 

Lastly, is it better to run 4 x 4Gb RAM or 2x 8Gb ? (About same price)

 

I am NOT an overclocker, so please don't suggest I beat the $h!t out of my current CPU

My wallet and my obligations can't allow more than 200$ CAD of upgrades, so RyZen is out of reach for me

 

My usage is...well... atypical !

I main Linux Ubuntu for my normal day-to-day computing (photo editing, video editing, internet, anything casual)

The system barely even "works" to drive these kinds of tasks... Often staying at 600MHz per core and ramping up to 3,7Ghz when rendering.

I also experiment with VMs and parallel encoding, for fun! That drives it a little harder.

I am also experimenting with 3D CAD (freeCAD) and will likely have to learn SolidWorks for my job.

 

I also use Windows 7 for my job when I work at home as the VPN we have is restricting usage of Unix-type systems (Mac or Linux included)

Tried for a long time to make it work but I ended-up dual booting to windows.

 

This Windows session is also used for gaming... I am not a gamer per say... Just casual Overwatch and Bioshock player.

 

So my rig is more about work and rendering so stability is the key here.

 

Summary:

Q1: Is the upgrade to FX-5370 worth something? does this CPU have a feature or code-set that my old one does not that could be a show-stopper?

 

Q2: Is upgrading DDR3 RAM from 1600MHz to 1866MHz worth it? Would I see a "world of difference" ?

 

Q3: If I upgrade RAM, is 4 x 4Gb or 2 x 8Gb recommended? (I want a total of 16Gb)

 

 

Details of my setup:

 

MB: 990-FXA-UD7 rev 1.0

CPU: AMD 1100t black edition

RAM: Corsair DDR3 at 1600Mhz, 4 x 4Gb

GPU: Sapphire RadeonHD 7970 Dual X (3Gb)

LSI MegaRAID server class RAID controller

240Gb RAID 5 SSD ARRAY as main drive (blazing fast!)

240Gb RAID 1 SSD ARRAY for rendering output

NAS and USB drives for long term storage, around 5Tb total

 

Thanks guys!

[Thinkfreely]

So the honest truth is wait for more money and do a platform upgrade. At this point any improvement you get will be negligible and quickly redundant due to where we are in the tech/upgrade cycle.

 

Take that $200 and just exercise some patience, go mow some lawns, sell some old stuff, do some chores and get enough to swap systems, because at this point spending more money into a platform that is not only old but has no valuable upgrade path would, in my opinion, be a poor spend of your hard earned cash.

[Normand_Nadon]

1 minute ago, Thinkfreely said:

So the honest truth is wait for more money and do a platform upgrade. At this point any improvement you get will be negligible and quickly redundant due to where we are in the tech/upgrade cycle.

 

Take that $200 and just exercise some patience, go mow some lawns, sell some old stuff, do some chores and get enough to swap systems, because at this point spending more money into a platform that is not only old but has no valuable upgrade path would, in my opinion, be a poor spend of your hard earned cash.

Thanks for your honest answer.

 

I am past the age of mowing my neighbor's grass for some money. I am a 32yo grown man with 3 kids a wife and a house to take care of.

200$ is pretty much my annual budget for computer upgrade! (unless for some reason a game changer makes my system completely obsolete, unable to run even the slightest task it has to and a complete platform update becomes mandatory)

 

My question is more about knowing if the 1100t can do the same job as the FX-5370 or if this upgrade can extend the life of my PC.

[AncientNerd]

3 minutes ago, Normand_Nadon said:

Thanks for your honest answer.

 

I am past the age of mowing my neighbor's grass for some money. I am a 32yo grown man with 3 kids a wife and a house to take care of.

200$ is pretty much my annual budget for computer upgrade! (unless for some reason a game changer makes my system completely obsolete, unable to run even the slightest task it has to and a complete platform update becomes mandatory)

 

My question is more about knowing if the 1100t can do the same job as the FX-5370 or if this upgrade can extend the life of my PC.

I don't think there is going to be enough difference in the two processors to count as an extended life, put your $200 into a "for next year" account and plan on a $400 upgrade next year. With that you will probably be able to replace the CPU/MBO/Memory around the 2018 Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales.

[Thinkfreely]

3 minutes ago, Normand_Nadon said:

My question is more about knowing if the 1100t can do the same job as the FX-5370 or if this upgrade can extend the life of my PC.

Hey I get it man, I have a brand new baby and a wife, life will kick your wallet's ass all day long. The issue is that (Depending on games) your going to have a steep wall to climb in terms of performance. Alot of developers didn't take time to properly support AMD's Bullzoder chips, which why they performed so poorly (That and bad cache allocation). For your usage such as creation programs, there isn't going to be a huge difference between the two, and your usage case will be much better improved, but I think the experience would still be bad enough that you would regret putting in that money.

 

 

[Trulop]

I would agree that saving up for a platform rebuild would be the best choice, but its also much more expensive to replace majority of your components than to upgrade 1. an FX-8350 would be a bit of an upgrade from your cpu, gaming might see a minimal increase as single core performance is mostly the same but you'll gain 2 more cores, and you can get one for like 80$ when they go on sale and wouldnt need to upgrade your other components. IF you feel that you could use a bit more headroom, i would say its up to you if its worth it or not. I run an 8350 in one of my rigs with turbo off (capped at 4.0GHz) and it does just fine. get 60 FPS in most games, higher end titles on medium/high settings maybe 45-50 average FPS and im only running a GTX 950 with it.

As for ram, if you were to upgrade your cpu, dont mess with the ram. upping to 1866 from 1600 wont really do much, and would just cost an arm and a leg more for no substantial gain.

[Normand_Nadon]

6 hours ago, Thinkfreely said:

 Alot of developers didn't take time to properly support AMD's Bullzoder chips, which why they performed so poorly (That and bad cache allocation). For your usage such as creation programs, there isn't going to be a huge difference between the two, and your usage case will be much better improved, but I think the experience would still be bad enough that you would regret putting in that money.

I've read some stories about the nightmares of first series Bulldozer CPUs but I thought they had that fixed on the latest versions (8350 and 8370) haven't they?

I know my 1100t is a good contender, several people preferred the thuban Architecture over Bulldozer but the more I read on the subject, the more confused I get!

 

6 hours ago, Trulop said:

As for ram, if you were to upgrade your cpu, dont mess with the ram. upping to 1866 from 1600 wont really do much, and would just cost an arm and a leg more for no substantial gain.

Thanks for the input... After reading your post I realized that My RAM is probably faster than "Value" 1866 RAM as I have very low latency compared to cheap RAM on newegg or NCIX... (Mine is 9-9-9-7 and most affordable RAM on the market is much slower)

 

I guess you guys have convinced me... I will probably keep this rig like it is for now and wait until I can justify a complete system upgrade. It still performs WAY over most  average computers (all premium parts, just a little old!). It's just that for the first time since 2012, AMD has got my nerd side exited with the RyZen and Vega Launches and it got me searching the internet to compare my setup (not something I usually do!).

 

Thanks again for you inputs.

[Thinkfreely]

11 minutes ago, Normand_Nadon said:

I've read some stories about the nightmares of first series Bulldozer CPUs but I thought they had that fixed on the latest versions (8350 and 8370) haven't they?

I know my 1100t is a good contender, several people preferred the thuban Architecture over Bulldozer but the more I read on the subject, the more confused I get!

No, unfortunately because the way its shares resources, developers never really took the time create support for it.

[Guest]

Really 200$ you could add a SSD or something that would make sure system a lot more responsive. I upgraded a 1100T to a 8350fx and in multithreaded tasks its around a 20-30% upgrade like others here i wouldn't recommend it. 

 

Edit i see that you own a 2 ssd's anyways so yeah either take a look at the used market and see if you can get a modern haswell based i5 CPU in a prebuilt or save your money for next year. 

[Guest]

It's also always better to run 2 8GB sticks over 4, 4GB ones. Easier on the integrated memory controller 

[Normand_Nadon]

4 minutes ago, jdwii said:

Really 200$ you could add a SSD or something that would make sure system a lot more responsive. I upgraded a 1100T to a 8350fx and in multithreaded tasks its around a 20-30% upgrade like others here i wouldn't recommend it. 

 

Edit i see that you own a 2 ssd's anyways so yeah either take a look at the used market and see if you can get a modern haswell based i5 CPU in a prebuilt or save your money for next year. 

Yeah, hard drive on my machine are way overkill... SSDs on RAID5 with a real server class RAID controller... Not a big bottleneck there

20-30% increase in CPU performance is HUGE... Intel does not provide such an upscale between generations of the same range of CPU !

Are you sure about those numbers?

6 minutes ago, jdwii said:

It's also always better to run 2 8GB sticks over 4, 4GB ones. Easier on the integrated memory controller 

Can you elaborate on that? you talk about the CPU's memory controller or some MB functionality?

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Normand_Nadon said:

Yeah, hard drive on my machine are way overkill... SSDs on RAID5 with a real server class RAID controller... Not a big bottleneck there

20-30% increase in CPU performance is HUGE... Intel does not provide such an upscale between generations of the same range of CPU !

Are you sure about those numbers?

Can you elaborate on that? you talk about the CPU's memory controller or some MB functionality?

Yes i'm very sure but only in tasks that are heavily multithreaded which it seems like that's your workflow. 

 

It's very hard for me to recommend you to buy a new 8350-8300 unless you can find one for 80$ or so, Also 2dimms is for sure the way to go if you can but if you already have 2 4GB sticks and you just want to add 2 more 4GB sticks then i guess that's fine. Much cheaper then starting fresh and by the way do not upgrade your memory speed its simply not worth the money. 

 

 http://techreport.com/review/23750/amd-fx-8350-processor-reviewed/11

 

I mean it can be between 10-30% overall its probably close to 20%. I noticed a decent advantage in handbrake. Single threaded tasks will be a little bit faster mainly cause you run your Phenom II X6 at stock. One thing i have to say is you could sell that Phenom II x6 for a little cash i sold mine kind of hated selling it as i had such a nice chip that overclocked to 3.9ghz at stock voltage. 

 

Funny Ryzen overclocks like the Phenom II haha which i mean not much. 

 

But don't spend the extra money on a FX 8370 just get a 8350 as that chip was more common and you could find good ones used online for about 100$. Also do not get a low clocked 8 core FX since you don't want to overclock last thing you want is a low clocked FX chip that could end up feeling more like a side grade then an upgrade. 

[Normand_Nadon]

Thanks for all your good advices... 

I ended-up buying a discounted brand new FX-8370 CPU that has the brand new Wraith cooler (same as the new Wraith Max coller but without RGB leds)

 

The price was relatively good (same as FX-8350 with no cooler!) and I will be maxing-out the capacity of my rig...

Now before you ask, it was 174.99$ canadian dollars + 6$ shipping... Not cheap, but hell of a lot cheaper than buying a whole new setup!

In US dollars, it totals around 140$ at current rate.

 

I will keep my 1100t for an HTPC build that I am planning... probably disabling turbo core and keeping it at 3,3GHz for it to live another 15 years in my living room!

Still have my old GTS450 and many empty computer cases laying around with ok power supplies. Will make a great streaming machine and home NAS with basic gaming capabilities (I said Basic!)

 

I will keep you posted as soon as I receive it and sure hope I wont be disappointed... Though 700MHz faster at stock and 600MHz on turbo core plus an extra pair of cores will surely make a lot of difference !

[Normand_Nadon]

So, I received the package and installed the new CPU in my machine...

To my big surprise, this FX chip came in with the new RGB Wraith cooler!
Although I had to fiddle around a couple of hours to have the USB RGB driver to behave, just to find out that the blue LED won't light up if the fan speed is not over 55%.

The LEDs are probably powering themselves through the fan header and Blue LEDs require more voltage to light up. (normally green LEDs too, but it was not an issue here)
I do believe that the LED RGB controller is inside the fan case because once you set the light pattern you want, you can remove the USB cable and the cooler's RGB will keep the settings you chose forever.

 

Without further ado, here is the beast!

 

 

This update gave me from 13% to 27% performance upgrade, depending on the application, over my previous setup.

It runs cooler and quieter, thanks to the wraith cooler, but I suspect it uses more power at all time than the 6 core CPU...

I do not have a power meter at hand right now.