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Hey everyone, I have a dilemma.

In researching my latest full-scale upgrade, I've seen a LOT of folks... I don't wanna say "bashing" AMD, but it's clear that enthusiasts favor Intel a lot more these days (If someone told me a decade ago that this would happen I woulda laughed in their face).

However, the cheapest decent intel core I can find is close to $200, while the AMD I want is like $100. And I'm trying to be budget-conscious here, however, I cannot ignore the claims that AMD chips just aren't holding up these days. Mostly because of a problem I'm facing now: I have an AM3 board, but there's no such thing as AM3 chips to put INTO it anymore (Just AM3+). I'm hugely disappointed by this... mostly because my board is blue and pretty but also because 4 years ago it seemed to be extremely future-proof and I was expecting it to last me closer to a decade. But apparently AMD stopped supporting the AM3 platform within a year or two, leaving me with a less-than-stellar processor and no way to upgrade without getting a new mobo.

Now here's the thing: the AMD offering I mentioned above looks a bit better than the intel one: 6 cores vs 4, 3.5ghz vs 3.2, L2 cache is 3x2Mb vs 4x256Kb, L3 cache is 8mb vs 6mb...

To find an Intel core with better numbers costs closer to 400-500 bucks. I'm not spending that kind of money.

However, I am aware that printed numbers don't always tell the whole story. I'm amenable to going with the i5 if someone can explain to me why its lower numbers somehow equal a much better performance for twice the cost. At the very least, the board I'd have to buy has to last a couple upgrade cycles, because otherwise that's another $100 i have to plunk down for an OS, so if today's AMD chipsets aren't going to be supported in a few years (but Intel's definitely would be), that may sway my opinion as well (or maybe not, as by that point I might be tempted to get Win10 anyway).

Any advice/info/wisdom/food-for-thought/cookies would be very welcome, thanks in advance!

The Intel processor that you want costs $230 or $340 at Newegg. If you're near a Micro Center, they have unbeatable in-store deals on CPU+motherboard combinations.

The competitive AMD CPU is the $180 FX-8350. Here's the comparison that shows why:
http://techreport.com/review/26977/inte ... reviewed/6

Check your motherboard manufacturer's CPU support page to see if the FX-8350 or FX-8370 will work with the latest BIOS.

I put an AM3+ chip (FX-8350) into my AM3 board (Asus Crosshair 4). Works great. Some mobo manufacturers provided a BIOS update to allow AM3+ CPU's to work, others didn't.

As far as the Intel vs AMD CPU's you are looking at, why not just look at all the CPU benchmarks available on the Internet? I mean, its really easy to find this information.

Numbers like clock speed, cache size, etc. don't tell the whole story. Architecture of x86 processors has diverged far enough that the raw numbers are essentially meaningless. You need to look at IPC, and performance in benchmarks that have some relevance to your use case.

In general, AMD is still a reasonable choice if you're not interested in bleeding edge (especially single-core) performance; their CPUs and platforms are priced accordingly. Don't count on an upgrade path beyond AM3+, since current indications are that it may be AMD's "last hurrah" in the non-budget desktop space. If you're OK with that, AMD's FX series is still a decent (and quite cost-effective) option, especially if your workload tends to be multi-threaded.

Otherwise, you probably want to go Intel. (And yes, it pains me to say this, I'm a long-time AMD user myself... I am posting this from an FX-8320!)

the problem with AMD nowdays is that they are not as good per core/per clock as intel are
remember the pentium 4 days when they had massive clocks but were still inferior to amd processors? its the same thing with amd and intel processors nowdays except amd are the ones that are not as good per clock

you wont be getting much in the way of motherboards lasting a few upgrade cycles anymore because the next amd cpu will be a major change in architecture and i doubt that it will be compatible with current sockets but that cpu wont be coming out till 2016
you usually get 2 generations of cpu out of intel sockets the current intel socket is skt 1150 which is compatible with haswell and most likely broadwell, the previous socket was 1155 which was ivy bridge and sandy bridge

the only thing that saves amd is the fact they have 8 cores and if you are buying a cpu because you have a program that uses 8 cores they are actually better price/performance than intel processors

but games mostly dont use more than 2 or 3 cores so with games almost any (even a dual core in some cases) intel cpu is better than an AMD cpu

i3 dual core vs 8 core amd as well as a i5 thrown in
http://www.hardcoreware.net/intel-core-i3-4340-review/4/


it all depends on your budget and usage - if you are using it for games i would recommend an intel if you are using it for video encoding then i would say amd if you are doing all sorts of things that include gaming then i would say intel again

Yeats: Most of the benchmarks I've found just have lists of All The Things (except for the specific products I was looking at) and were a bit much overwhelming to look at, though they clearly showed that intel chips had a performance edge. However, I did another search and found a site that lets me just type in model numbers and compare, which is what I needed. So, thanks for prompting me to take another look!

In the interest of full disclosure, my main motivation for upgrading is just games, nothing else too fancy or complicated. I figured I could just get away with a video card upgrade, but I compared my system to the latest consoles and realized my proc was pretty far behind, leading me to believe that next-gen ports wouldn't run too well (GTA 5, Arkham Knight, and whatever the next AAA release might be). It's also part of the reason I'm trying to be budget-conscious: I don't see the sense in spending a thousand dollars on a glorified internet-browsing device that can also happen to play a few new titles when I can buy a console for half the price and play the same games. I'll pay a little more for convenience, unlocked fps, mods, etc, but not THAT much (I realize being a PC enthusiast and being cheap are kinda antithetical, but let's just say my level of disposable income isn't that great). However, I've been burned trying to be frugal before (never, NEVER getting another open-box/refurbished item ever again!), which is why I'm trying to be more open to Intel.

That said, I'm not in a HUGE hurry... is there anything that might shake up prices in the next month or so that should give me a reason to wait, see if I can save a few bucks?

Do not wait for anything to shake up CPU prices. AMD has no new products of consequence on the horizon, and Intel is not afraid of them any more. Because of this, price/performance of desktop CPUs will likely not see much movement in 2015. Most of the action these days is in the low-power segment, as Intel continues to focus their efforts on addressing ARM's lead in mobile devices.

Steele wrote:

However, I am aware that printed numbers don't always tell the whole story. I'm amenable to going with the i5 if someone can explain to me why its lower numbers somehow equal a much better performance for twice the cost. At the very least, the board I'd have to buy has to last a couple upgrade cycles, because otherwise that's another $100 i have to plunk down for an OS, so if today's AMD chipsets aren't going to be supported in a few years (but Intel's definitely would be), that may sway my opinion as well (or maybe not, as by that point I might be tempted to get Win10 anyway).

Any advice/info/wisdom/food-for-thought/cookies would be very welcome, thanks in advance!

Forget the upgrade pathway of the AM3+ and the 1150 sockets. The newer DDR4 is coming and will require socket changes. So, the i5 motherboard will not last you very long. The AM3+ motherboard is already deprecated, but at least it is cheaper.

Obviously, the best budget option would be to see whether your AM3 motherboard can support an AM3+ processor. SOME do (a few ASUS motherboards at least). Check with your manufacturer and especially the latest BIOS support.

Anyway, if you want a gaming machine get the i5. If you are interested in office tasks and web browsing, get the cheapest CPU you can find (or, don't upgrade?). If you mostly need multithreaded performance (video encoding, photo editing) the AMD might give your more performance per dollar, but with higher power consumption. Another option to consider for gaming only would be the cheaper "special edition" G3258 pentium that is unlocked at 2x3.2GHz and costs only $80 or something. Many people have overclocked this chip to >4 GHz with little effort so that would give you something like a 20-30% headroom to explore in the future if you are interested/adventurous.

Finally, if you can afford it, the i5 "Devils' canyon" 4690K is probably the best choice but is probably a bit more than $200. It is much faster than anything AMD has out and also almost as fast as ANY other Intel processor for gaming. You can't do much better than this without spending a lot of money.

Steele wrote:

In the interest of full disclosure, my main motivation for upgrading is just games

go intel then

Steele wrote:

It's also part of the reason I'm trying to be budget-conscious: I don't see the sense in spending a thousand dollars on a glorified internet-browsing device that can also happen to play a few new titles............ However, I've been burned trying to be frugal before (never, NEVER getting another open-box/refurbished item ever again!), which is why I'm trying to be more open to Intel.

the low end intel pentium g3258 is actually a bargain if you dont mind overclocking


http://techreport.com/review/26735/overclocking-intel-pentium-g3258-anniversary-edition-processor/3
not bad for a budget cpu..!
and its just $69 at newegg which is over half the price of the cheapest 8 core amd
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117374&cm_re=g3258-_-19-117-374-_-Product

you will need a z97 motherboard to OC but you can always upgrade to a quad core intel i5 or i7 later if you like as they slot into the same motherboard if you feel the need for more speed

the core i3 4150 is a pretty good price ($119) and because its an i3 it has hyperthreading (4 thread on 2 cores) which will help with games that really use 4 threads - not as good as a true 4 cpu processor but its a damn good cpu nonetheless
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116995

Steele wrote:

That said, I'm not in a HUGE hurry... is there anything that might shake up prices in the next month or so that should give me a reason to wait, see if I can save a few bucks?

nope nothing coming that will shake up prices in fact cpu progress has been crawling along for around 5 years now with only 5% ish jumps in performance with each generation of intel cpus since amd has pretty much just given up on desktop cpu's (their last cpu architecture was released around 2011 and nothing else will be coming from them until 2016 at the earliest)
broadwell is coming around the end of 2015 but dont expect it to blow away what is out now - its just another minor bump of around 5% maybe

As others have pointed out, Intel is for gaming.

AMD processors play games fine, but only when the graphics card is the bottleneck. If you have:

a) a very powerful graphics card
b) turn down the graphics settings to get higher framerates

...you'll expose the differences between an Intel CPU for gaming and an AMD CPU for gaming.
Unless you plan on making a productivity-only PC these days, it's hard to recommend AMD. Low single-threaded performance, outdated architecture, an abandoned platform, no future processors desktop processors planned, and worst of all - it's all hot, noisy and power-hungry. AMD's only real progress are in mobile CPUs - or APU's as they call them - for laptops.

I was in almost the exact same predicament at the start of the year; the only reason I had to upgrade was gaming, therefore I could only justify it by doing it as cheaply as possible. I whittled down my options to a FX-6350 based upgrade for £200 vs a i5-4670K based upgrade for £300.

While Intel made large jumps in single thread performance following Core 2 AMD has failed to improve significantly since Phenom II. Since Sandybridge (Core iX-2000 series) Intel has been resting on it's laurels but their single threaded performance is still king. Single-threaded performance is still what matters in gaming, as the others have pointed out, the dual-core Pentium G3528 can keep up with and sometimes best processors with double, triple or quadruple the cores.

That said, I wouldn't recommend a Dual-core processor. Just as many games are held back on systems with poor single-thread performance there are increasing numbers of games which will be held back with only 2 cores, especially with the current generation of consoles having 8-cores.

There is no reason to go with a new AMD system because it probably performs similarly to your current system in single-threaded games. The way I see it, unfortunately, there is a threshold for gaming performance and it sits at the price of an i5 system, if you're not spending that then you're really not benefitting much and Intel prices aren't going to fall anytime soon. Intel's single-threaded performance probably won't increase significantly for some time and nor will their prices fall since there is no competition from AMD. Intel, and higher end Intel (i5-i7), is really the only choice that makes sense for a lasting system, in fact since an unlocked K variant costs just a little more that's an even better choice.

You are 99.99% guaranteed to run a 4690K @ 4C 3.9GHz on a ~$60 MCE enabled mobo on a stock cooler, while overclocking a FX on a budget mobo is a much more hit-and-miss situation with the added heat/power/cooling costs. If it's gaming its a no brainer to go Intel even if you can save $50 with AMD compared to a $300 Intel combo.

Yeah, don't plan on OCing an FX unless you need a space heater. They run hot enough on CPU intensive tasks at stock clock, and power usage climbs quite rapidly if you start bumping the core voltage.

Steele,

I don't know if you're familiar with Anandtech's Bench web app (maybe it's the site you mentioned you found), but it's pretty useful for things like this. Here's a link that will show you a direct comparisonof the FX-6350 ($125 at newegg) and the i3-4360 ($145 at newegg)in a wide variety of tests:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1281?vs=1197

Gaming scores are at the bottom of the page, but here's the spoiler: in their test data, the i3 about even with the FX chip. They trade blows, but the difference is small - one or two FPS here and there. And that's comparing a 6 core AMD chip to a 2 core with hyperthreading Intel one (one of the top-end i3s, but you get the point). If you look at the non-gaming tests you'll see that the i3 manages to come out on top in nearly all of them, even some of the multithreading tests, with exception to a few that can really take advantage of all 6 AMD cores.

I just bring this up as I think Bench is a really useful utility for showing the difference between the processor architectures.

Anyways! That said, as ptsant pointed out, DDR4 memory is on the horizon and that means new motherboards, chipsets and processors. Intel's Broadwell desktop chips - which I think are due out in Q2 of next year now - are still going to use socket 1150, and the H97/Z97 boards out now should, in theory, have support for those processors with a BIOS update. But I wouldn't expect Broadwell to be a huge leap from Haswell, so if you were to buy now, you'd probably want to just buy big - a Core i7, maybe - as it wouldn't make much sense to upgrade past that. And I think Skylake (the next architecture on their roadmap) is going to use a new socket, 1151. So that would involve a whole other system upgrade.

Basically, my point is, if you want to do an upgrade to your system with the goal of having it last a while, and have a new upgrade option in two year's time - nothing currently available fits that.

So, if you're trying to be budget conscious, I'm going to actually go against the grain here and say you should get the fastest AMD processor you can put in your motherboard, like that FX-6350 (or 8350, but I don't think you'd see any real gaming advantage from the extra 2 cores while still within the system's usable lifespan).

That'll give you plenty more time with your current system.

(Also, I didn't see it listed anywhere, what motherboard/processor are you currently using?)

Lots to chew on here.

Derub, the site I found was CPUBoss or something like that, but thanks for the anand link, though! My current spec is an AMD X4 630 2.8 GhZ (that's slightly OC'd) on a Gigabyte GA-770TA-UD3 (which doesn't seem to support any AM3+ procs), 8g ram and a GeForce GTX 460 (786 ram version). It runs games ok with some finer details notched down, but the components are 4-6 years old now and I'm getting the upgrade itch.

On that note, I'm gonna take this convo to the System Builders forum, post a build idea and ask for input on all that, don't wanna get too off-topic. Thanks again to everyone here for their input (though I'm sure I'll see a few of you over there haswell! Er, as well!)

AMD peaked with the Phenom II. If you already have one, just OC the stuffing out of it, since they clock pretty good. A good chunk will hit ~4Ghz on air.

I'm with people here who suggest to first check whether your AM3 board can take an FX-8350. If you're on a tight budget, chances are you're also not gonna be buying a high end video card which dwarfs the cost of a $100 CPU. So even with a midrange video card, I doubt you'd see much difference between an FX-8350 and a Haswell i5. If I were in your shoes and my AM3 mobo can take an 8350, that's the route I'd go with. Plus, seeing as most games don't use 8 cores and more like 4 at most, you might opt to get an FX-6350 or -6300 and just overclock it a little, assuming your board can do it. Pay special attention to your board's supported CPU wattage.

Edit - Oh so your board doesn't support FX CPUs. Hence it's obvious there's no way you would be buying just the new CPU if you wanna upgrade. Either you buy a cheap AM3+ board along with an FX or forget about upgrading for a while, save up for a few months more, and reward yourself for the wait with a Core i5 and supporting board. Or you could also hold out for Skylake.

I looked up the CPU support list on their website and it looks like the best proc you could put in there would be a Phenom II X6 1100T (3.3GHz, 6 cores, 125W) or a Phenom II X4 980 (3.7GHz, 4 cores, 125W), neither of which would be sizeable enough upgrade from your existing proc to really be worth the price.

That means your options are really: don't do anything and hold out a little longer, maybe waiting for Broadwell or Skylake from Intel, or just do a new system build now. I'll look for your thread in system builders.

l33t-g4m3r wrote:

AMD peaked with the Phenom II. If you already have one, just OC the stuffing out of it, since they clock pretty good. A good chunk will hit ~4Ghz on air.

In fact, Vishera and Kaveri are not bad. It's just that they are inferior to expectations and the competition. Compared with the Phenom II, for example, the Kaveri Athlon 860K is a stellar performer with much lower power consumption and priced at only ~$80. It's just not worth buying into the platform (similarly for an FX8350). If you could just plug'n'play an FX8350 in place of a Phenom II, most of the time you would be quite happy with the result.

Keep in mind that crysis is a best case example.

Not all games are threaded well.

And while you would expect them to be so now, and certainly to be so in the future, as the consoles are all highly parallel low ipc systems, obviously we can see that that design hasn't really taken over in the present, and who is to say to what extent it will later.

There is also the power concern. The AMD chips suck a lot of it from the wall. Up to months ago, which was when last I looked at AMD benchmarks, the 8350 didn't completely suck. But it's game-dependent. If it's not optimized for lots of threads, it's not going to run as good. And interestingly, those games that are processor optimized to run well on Vishera and Kaveri etc, only really do so with Mantle. Correct me if I'm wrong on that.

ronch wrote:

I'm with people here who suggest to first check whether your AM3 board can take an FX-8350. If you're on a tight budget, chances are you're also not gonna be buying a high end video card which dwarfs the cost of a $100 CPU. So even with a midrange video card, I doubt you'd see much difference between an FX-8350 and a Haswell i5. If I were in your shoes and my AM3 mobo can take an 8350, that's the route I'd go with. Plus, seeing as most games don't use 8 cores and more like 4 at most, you might opt to get an FX-6350 or -6300 and just overclock it a little, assuming your board can do it. Pay special attention to your board's supported CPU wattage.

Edit - Oh so your board doesn't support FX CPUs. Hence it's obvious there's no way you would be buying just the new CPU if you wanna upgrade. Either you buy a cheap AM3+ board along with an FX or forget about upgrading for a while, save up for a few months more, and reward yourself for the wait with a Core i5 and supporting board. Or you could also hold out for Skylake.

Another problem is that that's less of an option. It's not the best idea to just stick Vishera on a low-end board because of how much power it requires. That said, they do have respins of the 8300 series now. I haven't seen the benchmarks.

fhohj wrote:

There is also the power concern. The AMD chips suck a lot of it from the wall.

Yes, particularly under load, and especially so if overclocked. Idle (or lightly loaded) power isn't that bad, but Intel definitely has an edge on power usage (and heat generation) across the board.

fhohj wrote:

That said, they do have respins of the 8300 series now. I haven't seen the benchmarks.

AFAICT they're just re-binned parts with the same design and manufacturing process. For the 'E' suffix (energy efficient) parts they've tweaked the thresholds where turbo disengages (and/or where throttling kicks in), in order to cap the TDP at 95W.

Still damn good bang-for-the-buck if you can make use of 8 cores and/or aren't going to be hurt by lower single-threaded performance, but no current games (that I'm aware of) fall into that category. Bottom line is, the architecture of AMD's current CPUs is optimized for workloads which are more server-like; and even in that market segment, the current Opterons are handicapped by mediocre performance per watt.

fhohj wrote:

There is also the power concern. The AMD chips suck a lot of it from the wall.

I just picked up an FX-8300 after Thanksgiving, and one of the nice things about it (aside from giving me twice the cores) is that has a TDP of 95 W, as opposed to 140 on the Phenom II 965 replaced. I know that's the maximum it's expected to pull, not the average, but the Phenom II's were definitely not low-power parts.

[edited to correct TDP number]

My opinion, generally limited to AMD's FX chips and Intel's Core i5 chips:

Intel chips are appreciable higher performing in most typical scenarios, and especially in gaming scenarios.
Intel chips run cooler, use less power, are more overclockable, use less power when overclocked.
Intel-based motherboards usually perform appreciably better in SATA and USB transfers.

I don't like saying it but it is not a hard decision to make these days. I was AMD for a decade and finally could not do it any more and switched to a Core i5 4670K, which is shamefully running at stock speed. I am thrilled with the CPU and I am thrilled with the SATA and USB performance that I had denied myself for years by going AMD. I hate that there is not an AMD option that I feel is a viable option for my money, but I am totally pleased with the purchase I made.

I am not sure sure why anyone would need to convinced of Intel. Its just so much better. The only place it wins is budget gpu/opencl.

Steele wrote:

Hey everyone, I have a dilemma.

In researching my latest full-scale upgrade, I've seen a LOT of folks... I don't wanna say "bashing" AMD, but it's clear that enthusiasts favor Intel a lot more these days (If someone told me a decade ago that this would happen I woulda laughed in their face).

However, the cheapest decent intel core I can find is close to $200, while the AMD I want is like $100. And I'm trying to be budget-conscious here, however, I cannot ignore the claims that AMD chips just aren't holding up these days. Mostly because of a problem I'm facing now: I have an AM3 board, but there's no such thing as AM3 chips to put INTO it anymore (Just AM3+). I'm hugely disappointed by this... mostly because my board is blue and pretty but also because 4 years ago it seemed to be extremely future-proof and I was expecting it to last me closer to a decade. But apparently AMD stopped supporting the AM3 platform within a year or two, leaving me with a less-than-stellar processor and no way to upgrade without getting a new mobo.

Now here's the thing: the AMD offering I mentioned above looks a bit better than the intel one: 6 cores vs 4, 3.5ghz vs 3.2, L2 cache is 3x2Mb vs 4x256Kb, L3 cache is 8mb vs 6mb...

To find an Intel core with better numbers costs closer to 400-500 bucks. I'm not spending that kind of money.

However, I am aware that printed numbers don't always tell the whole story. I'm amenable to going with the i5 if someone can explain to me why its lower numbers somehow equal a much better performance for twice the cost. At the very least, the board I'd have to buy has to last a couple upgrade cycles, because otherwise that's another $100 i have to plunk down for an OS, so if today's AMD chipsets aren't going to be supported in a few years (but Intel's definitely would be), that may sway my opinion as well (or maybe not, as by that point I might be tempted to get Win10 anyway).

Any advice/info/wisdom/food-for-thought/cookies would be very welcome, thanks in advance!

I **WAS** in the past a huge AMD fan, even bought (6) x6 thuban's... (4) 1090ts and (2) 1100t's for my personal and test rigs... wow was I deluding my self. AMD fan no longer.

the 4 4690k's I bought for my personal test lab for work are running actual circles around the old rigs while data migration is running. on the home rigs, the (1) 4690k running at 4.3ghz DECIMATES BEYOND ALL HOPE AND FPS the 4ghz 6core unit... BD\PD\SR would be worse.

go intel. but dont SKIMP

just brew it! wrote:

Don't count on an upgrade path beyond AM3+, since current indications are that it may be AMD's "last hurrah" in the non-budget desktop space.

I find that hard to believe that AMD won't release any more FX style chips. They're going to have Opterons that won't pass certification for one reason or another, and they might as well sell them as FX chips and get a few bucks.

AM3+ is a dead platform. I agree with that. My guess is that the next gen Opterons will be SOCs that won't need an external bridge chips, which is why AMD hasn't released a successor or updated their server chipsets in a while.

Flatland_Spider wrote:

I find that hard to believe that AMD won't release any more FX style chips. They're going to have Opterons that won't pass certification for one reason or another, and they might as well sell them as FX chips and get a few bucks.

Rolling out another SKU is still work for them (and for the motherboard makers, who need to provide the BIOS updates). Given how small of a performance bump the FX-8370 is over the FX-8350 I'm not sure what the point of doing that would be unless the manufacturing process improves enough to yield non-trivial increases in base clocks without pushing TDPs sky high. If they could produce something with clock speeds similar to the FX-9590, but with a TDP of 140W instead of 220W, that would be a meaningful last upgrade for AM3+ users since it would be a worthwhile speed bump, and work in many existing AM3+ motherboards with just a BIOS flash.

It doesn't make sense to worry about the socket upgrade path any more.
Performance increases between consecutive x86 CPU generations are very small.
Just buy the fastest CPU you can afford and use it for the same long time you used to keep a motherboard for.
Depending on your needs, a top of the line CPU will be enough for five to seven or even ten years.

TheEmrys wrote:

I am not sure sure why anyone would need to convinced of Intel. Its just so much better. The only place it wins is budget gpu/opencl.

Well, I've been an AMD die hard since I first started making my own systems close to 2 decades ago (closer to 16/17 years really, but I like to exaggerate), and tbh I never even would have made this thread except for the fact that I went to use TR's x-mas guide to find a good AMD recommendation, only to find that there wasn't one! Well, they did have ONE on the list, but it came with a big fat disclaimer that it's just not worth it. Wanting to understand more without digging through 4-5 years worth of tech articles to find out where and why AMD went wrong and why paying almost twice as much for a numerically inferior product (less cores, frequency, etc) was worth it in everyone's eyes, I decided to straight-up ask.

Cuz see, last I checked (again, 4-5 years ago), AMD was maybe not "king", but the price/performance ratio made them an acceptable compromise to the big "i". And before THAT, no one in their right minds would touch intel. I had no reason to think that had changed until, again, I read the x-mas guide.

A lot changes in a few years. Heck, maybe in another 5 years AMD will be tops again, who knows?

just brew it! wrote:

Flatland_Spider wrote:

I find that hard to believe that AMD won't release any more FX style chips. They're going to have Opterons that won't pass certification for one reason or another, and they might as well sell them as FX chips and get a few bucks.

Rolling out another SKU is still work for them (and for the motherboard makers, who need to provide the BIOS updates). Given how small of a performance bump the FX-8370 is over the FX-8350 I'm not sure what the point of doing that would be unless the manufacturing process improves enough to yield non-trivial increases in base clocks without pushing TDPs sky high. If they could produce something with clock speeds similar to the FX-9590, but with a TDP of 140W instead of 220W, that would be a meaningful last upgrade for AM3+ users since it would be a worthwhile speed bump, and work in many existing AM3+ motherboards with just a BIOS flash.

If you consider CPU + mobo pricing, Intel has already claimed that for anything $250 and above. Spending $200 on a mobo to OC a 4690K is already pretty stupid, to do with a FX just to accomodate it's monstrous power draw is just outright nonsensical...AMD diehards simply don't get it.