For non-gaming is the AMD FX-6300 acceptable

[Radium_Angel]

I currently have an i5-650 and I'd like to build another rig. I've run across a good deal on an AMD FX-6300 and curious how it might stack up against the i5.

Any thoughts?

[ImNotThere]

a 6300 is effectively a three core so for non gaming id say no dont bother

[Fictionvl]

to be honest, i'll just say its not worth it, you're better off getting an i3 or something of a newer generation of processors 

[You_are_a_cunt]

for strict non-gaming it should be just fine, but i'm not sure what the i5-650's specs are or how they stack up against eachother.

keep in mind that you would need a gpu alongside the 6300

[Ryujin2003]

Wouldn't it be cheaper to upgrade to an earlier compatible i7?

 

Yes you could do the upgrade, buy a new MB and CPU, but I feel like you could find a better deal on a non-k Intel CPU tgat would be a little faster for the same price.

 

I mean it all comes down to price. If someone is going to give you a CPU and MB for super cheap, then go for it.

 

What is the estimated upgraded cost?

[Radium_Angel]

The CPU, Mobo and 750Ti was 100$

I didn't have a budget for a new build, just kicking some ideas around.

I mainly use my existing rig for LightRoom

 

And why do you say it's effectively a three-core CPU? the other three are hyperthreads?

[Columbo]

Get a R3 1200 and be done with the FX 6300. 

[TrigrH]

16 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

I currently have an i5-650 and I'd like to build another rig. I've run across a good deal on an AMD FX-6300 and curious how it might stack up against the i5.

Any thoughts?

how does it stack up? its slower than the i5 650 with a good OC on it.

 

Dont buy it, its not a good deal. I wouldn't take an FX chip if it was free tbh.

[Morgan MLGman]

5 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

And why do you say it's effectively a three-core CPU? the other three are hyperthreads?

It's a hexa-core CPU. There is no set definition of a CPU core so if AMD calls it 6-cores then it's 6-cores.
This CPU is designed with 3 modules, two cores each. These cores share some resources between each other in modules (that is why some people call it a 3 core CPU, they assume a module is a core which isn't accurate), but they'll still physical cores so you may think of this design as hardware-based hyperthreading. It's not the best architecture but it's not as terrible as some people make it to be.

 

If you can get the CPU cheaper than other options then it's not a terrible buy, it should serve you well for light workloads and will be a good pairing to the 750Ti that you mentioned.

 

5 minutes ago, TrigrH said:

how does it stack up? its slower than the i5 650 with a good OC on it.

Not really. It has 5-7% slower singlethreaded performance, but 65-85% faster multithreaded one (depending on clock speeds) so it's a faster CPU. What's more, it's on a newer platform with more modern features so there's not much competition here.

6 minutes ago, TrigrH said:

Dont buy it, its not a good deal. I wouldn't take an FX chip if it was free tbh.

Your loss They're not nearly as bad as you think

[TrigrH]

3 minutes ago, Morgan MLGman said:

Not really. It has 5-7% slower singlethreaded performance, but 65-85% faster multithreaded one (depending on clock speeds) so it's a faster CPU. What's more, it's on a newer platform with more modern features so there's not much competition here.

Your loss They're not nearly as bad as you think

For a CPU that was released 3 years later than the i5, looks pretty crap to me:

https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/144?vs=699

[Ansuex]

The FX-6300 is a nice CPU but you could also look for a cheap i7 for your board? I saw a i7 875k not too long ago going for 100 euro's used.

I think if you get a 4 core 8 thread i7 you should be good for quite some time, gives you the time to safe up for a new platform

[Morgan MLGman]

6 minutes ago, TrigrH said:

For a CPU that was released 3 years later than the i5, looks pretty crap to me:

https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/144?vs=699

It's not a particularly good CPU but it can handle GPUs up to an R9 380/380X level and has some multithreaded potential in it, so if you get it at a good price then it represents decent value.

Here's a more accurate benchmark comparing the two CPUs on the same workload: http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-650-vs-AMD-FX-6300/m340vs1555

The i5 is a 2C/4T old CPU and it's just slower than the FX-6300 in most tasks, especially once you overclock it...

I'd most likely choose something else but it all depends on local pricing and OP's budget.

[TrigrH]

1 minute ago, Morgan MLGman said:

The i5 is a 2C/4T old CPU 

RIP I thought it would atleast be a quad core, I had a 760 back in the day.

[ImNotThere]

50 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

The CPU, Mobo and 750Ti was 100$

I didn't have a budget for a new build, just kicking some ideas around.

I mainly use my existing rig for LightRoom

 

And why do you say it's effectively a three-core CPU? the other three are hyperthreads?

because 2 cores shares a floating point unit whereas normally each core has their own one, theoretically halving the performance of each core making it three cores, although windows sees 6, i say theoretically as for the most part its more than half the performance lost because of shared FPU

[Morgan MLGman]

5 minutes ago, TrigrH said:

RIP I thought it would atleast be a quad core, I had a 760 back in the day.

But upgrading that i5 to something like an i7-870 and overclocking it would be a good idea IMO, 4C/8T and is around the FX-8300 in terms of performance once both are OC'd

[Radium_Angel]

I don't overclock my gear, and it's not a homemade system currently. It's an Asus cg5275 computer, which, if the internet is to be believed, is a ASUS P7H55-M, which will support up to an i7-880 CPU.

My current rig has a GTX 660 and 8 GB DDR3 with a 120GB SSD for the OS and applications. A secondary 1 TB for data

[Herman Mcpootis]

3 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

I don't overclock my gear, and it's not a homemade system currently. It's an Asus cg5275 computer, which, if the internet is to be believed, is a ASUS P7H55-M, which will support up to an i7-880 CPU.

My current rig has a GTX 660 and 8 GB DDR3 with a 120GB SSD for the OS and applications. A secondary 1 TB for data

you can get a xeon x3440 and overclock for a nice performance boost, they only cost $16.45 on ebay.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Xeon-X3440-SLBLF-2-53GHz-Quad-Core-LGA-1156-CPU-Processor-/122752050730?hash=item1c9497a62a:g:crsAAOSwekhZ37xx

[SpaceGhostC2C]

2 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

And why do you say it's effectively a three-core CPU? the other three are hyperthreads?

Fake news.

 

1 hour ago, ImNotThere said:

because 2 cores shares a floating point unit whereas normally each core has their own one, theoretically halving the performance of each core making it three cores,

No, not in theory nor in practice a shared FPU implies half performance - there would be no point in having any of the other components inside the module if it did.

 

1 hour ago, ImNotThere said:

although windows sees 6, i say theoretically as for the most part its more than half the performance lost because of shared FPU

"More than half the performance lost" would mean that each module performs worse than a single core. Unless you mean more than half of the performance of the second core... that would not be obvious nonsense; however, it would still be not true. It's as easy as getting any FX chip and comparing its multithreaded performance with one core enabled per module vs. two cores enabled. It won't be twice the performance (multithreaded scaling seldom is 1/n, even using full cores, but still, it would be farther form 1/n than with full cores), but it will be way more than the same.

 

 

And even if you don't have an FX or any other module-based CPU, you can still do a quick check with something like Cinebench, by comparing the MP ratios of any FX CPU with those of traditional cores wihtout HT/SMT, and those of traditional cores with HT/SMT. That alone will tell you how far CMT is from being "sort of SMT".

[ImNotThere]

40 minutes ago, SpaceGhostC2C said:

Fake news.

 

No, not in theory nor in practice a shared FPU implies half performance - there would be no point in having any of the other components inside the module if it did.

 

"More than half the performance lost" would mean that each module performs worse than a single core. Unless you mean more than half of the performance of the second core... that would not be obvious nonsense; however, it would still be not true. It's as easy as getting any FX chip and comparing its multithreaded performance with one core enabled per module vs. two cores enabled. It won't be twice the performance (multithreaded scaling seldom is 1/n, even using full cores, but still, it would be farther form 1/n than with full cores), but it will be way more than the same.

 

 

And even if you don't have an FX or any other module-based CPU, you can still do a quick check with something like Cinebench, by comparing the MP ratios of any FX CPU with those of traditional cores wihtout HT/SMT, and those of traditional cores with HT/SMT. That alone will tell you how far CMT is from being "sort of SMT".

I was more refering to the use of a single FPU per core module, this would hinder the performance of a core, regardless as the FPU is being shared by two individual cores, as stated above, there is no concrete definition of a core so if amd really want to call a 4350 a quad core they can, same with 6300 hex and 8350 octa.

tbh im not sure what i meant by more than halfthe performance lost, i used to own an 8350 so i was probably referring toone benchmark in particular being around half andthen assumed the 6300 with "2" less cores would be less than half performance of the intel chip i moved to, could be wrong, i had only been awake for a short period at the time so was probably just flaming FX.

i am aware of diminishing returnsfrom multiple threads and aware that the scalability is not 100% between half a module and a full module. Also excuse my lack of knowledge but what does CMT stand for? im familiar with SMT and HT but havent come across that acronym before? 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

1 hour ago, ImNotThere said:

tbh im not sure what i meant by more than halfthe performance lost, i used to own an 8350 so i was probably referring toone benchmark in particular being around half andthen assumed the 6300 with "2" less cores would be less than half performance of the intel chip i moved to, could be wrong, i had only been awake for a short period at the time so was probably just flaming FX.

The thing when you compare with Intel is that you have many other factors at play, notably the large IPC difference, which translate to large performance differences when just one core is used (that is, independently of how AMD arranged their multi-core setup, they would still lag behind in performance). That's why, for the purpose of evaluating a particular implementation of multithreading for a given architecture I recommend looking at relative scaling, rather than absolute performance.

1 hour ago, ImNotThere said:

i am aware of diminishing returnsfrom multiple threads and aware that the scalability is not 100% between half a module and a full module. Also excuse my lack of knowledge but what does CMT stand for? im familiar with SMT and HT but havent come across that acronym before? 

CMT is "Clustered Multi-Threading", the generic name for the approach of building multi-core CPUs around "modules" as AMD did with Bulldozer and successors (just as SMT or "Simultaneous Multi-Threading" is the generic name for running multiple threads in a single core, which intel trademarked as HT in their particular implementation - I think AMD doesn't have a trade mark for theirs, so we just call it SMT ).

 

I think a good analogy for understanding SMT and CMT CPUs is:

- "Normal" single core CPU: a kitchen, with one oven, one stove, and one cook accepting one order at a time

- SMT single core CPU: a kitchen, with one oven, one stove, and one cook accepting two orders at a time, working in the second whenever he has idle time and resources (for example, first order is in the oven, and the second requires the stove).

- CMT "single module"/"dual core" CPU: a kitchen, with one oven, two stoves, and two cooks accepting one order each. They can sometimes do twice as much, but if both need the oven they'll have to wait after the each other.

- "Normal" dual core CPU: a kitchen, with two ovens, two stoves, and two cooks accepting one order each. They can pretty much ignore each other and get twice as much done as a single cook.

 

So I guess i9s or Threadrippers are Hell's restaurant