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Is there any benefit upgrading my CPU to say the 8350. I would like to increase my performance but am not willing to change to a whole new platform just yet.

My current specs are listed below.

If you need an upgrade from your quad-core Deneb processor, you should probably be looking at a $240 Haswell Core i5-4690K quad-core LGA1150 CPU and a Z97 motherboard.

$180 for a Vishera FX-8350 Black Edition eight-core CPU would improve single-threaded performance up to 20% (just barely enough to notice in routine use) and could double performance for heavily multi-threaded applications, but are you actually running something that needs 8 integer cores?

Ty JAE. I appreciate the suggestion, but like I said I'm not willing to replace my existing platform just yet. I did actually look at a 4790K but broadwell is just around the corner and I'm not willing to spend that much dough right now for haswell.

I would like to get a bit better performance since I'm starting to get into gaming with my kids and would like to learn more about photoshop and editing movies.

Would I see a noticeable performance boost moving to say a FX-8350?

Are we talking about gaming here, or something else?

For gaming, unless you're playing mostly older games your GPU is probably far and away your bottleneck, not the CPU. The per-thread performance of the 8350 isn't going to blow the doors off your Phenon II, and very few (if any) games will see a significant benefit from the extra 4 cores.

For non-gaming, if you routinely do stuff that will actually utilize all 8 cores (e.g. media encoding, scientific simulations, lots of simultaneous VMs), and you feel that the performance in those tasks is lacking, then upgrading to the 8350 would probably be worthwhile.

Edit: Just saw your latest post. What percentage of your use would you say is gaming, and what percentage movie editing and Photoshop? As noted above, the benefits for gaming would be dubious at best; but movie editing and Photoshop will probably see some improvements with the extra cores.

I have just started getting into gaming with the kids. I would say 15-20%. I would mostly be working with office programs, photoshop and video editing (starting a course and see where it will take me)

If the gaming performance is lacking, you're probably better off upgrading the GPU instead of the CPU.

Or hold off, and wait and see whether you really get into the movie editing and Photoshop stuff. Then decide whether you want the CPU upgrade.

TY. I think I'll hold off like you suggested and see where my courses take me.

Most Thuban X6 chips will OC to 3.8 or so at stock voltage and just about zero effort. The extra cores are helpful in some (but not nearly enough!) photo-editing filters and most video encoding, while the clock boost will be appreciated by the games. You might give one a try - used chips are <$100 on Fleabay, and you can always sell it back a minimal loss if it doesn't help as much as you'd like.

For gaming, you'll see about 20-25% better performance, but it depends on your graphics card as well. But seeing as you only play games about 15% to 20% of the time, then it doesn't look like it's of the utmost importance. The FX-8350 will handle most of your games just fine and I've finished a lot of games with it (more than 10) since I got it about 20 months ago. I think it deserves more credit than it's getting in terms of gaming performance. For office apps, yeah, maybe 20% better performance too, but it also depends on your storage. For video editing, the FX-8350 will give you better performance than an i5 in highly threaded video editing apps and is, IMHO, a sound choice because you can not only save a bit of money on the CPU (the 8350 is a little cheaper than say, a Core i5 4670K), you'll also save money by not buying a new motherboard. Personally I'd opt to get an FX if I was in your shoes.

He's still running a Radeon 6850 though. Newer games would probably benefit more from a GPU upgrade, as the GPU is probably holding back performance at this point.

Wouldn't a CPU still be holding me back as well?

Yes, your CPU could be holding back your gaming performance, depending on the game. It's not so bad that you won't be able to play the latest games but assuming you are gaming at 1080 then you may need to dial back some of the 'pretty prettys' to get the sort of performance that you want. If you are gaming at higher res than 1080 then you may well want to upgrade both the CPU and the GPU.

GPUs have advanced much more rapidly than CPUs have in the past several years. Your GPU is most likely to be holding back your gaming performance, especially at higher resolutions and with higher levels of anti-aliasing turned on.
$220 -20MIR for a Radeon R9-280 3GB graphics card would be a significant step up in gaming performance.

madseven7 wrote:

Wouldn't a CPU still be holding me back as well?

Potentially yes, depending on the game. But bumping the CPU up to a FX-8350 is probably not going to make a huge difference in gaming performance. If gaming was your primary use case (and I realize it isn't...), upgrading the GPU would be the clear choice if you don't have the budget to do both.

Just to give some insight, I use my 40" LED TV as my main monitor, which allows me to play games at 1080p along with my work stuff. My kids are always asking me to play with them so when I do some games I do have to scale down the "pretty pretty" settings but that's ok cause I don't play often enough to have it matter to me. However, if in the long term I get hooked on a game, then I would like to be able to play at higher settings but for now my courses and my work take priority.

BTW my kids like bf3/4, cod games like that.

your cpu should still be fine enough, im still currently running an athlon ii x4 645, which is just a bit less of a cpu than yours...

gpu wise i had a gtx 460 which is about the same performance as your hd6850 is, then i got an hd7870 a few months ago and it's a nice difference in performance, easily near 2x in a lot of games. my non phenom proccesor still keeps up with a lot of games, as your pii chip should.

not that a 6850 couldn't do 1080 still these days, it's just not as powerful so some things get turned down

Fleabay is awash in HD 78xx and 79xx cards. Pay your $70+ and take your chances!

Geonerd wrote:

Fleabay is awash in HD 78xx and 79xx cards. Pay your $70+ and take your chances!

lol I just might do that.

http://slickdeals.net/f/7107946-sapphir ... e-shipping
$225 -10MIR for a Radeon R9-280X 3GB is a lot of graphics oomph for the money. R9-280X is essentially the same as HD7970 boost.

Ty JAE. Hard to keep up with the different naming schemes by these companies. I didn't know that a 280x was like a 7970
with boost? Did you mean 7970 GHZ editon?

Are you from Alabama?

I find these two links very useful for decoding the re-re-re-rebadging rubbish in the graphics card world:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nv ... sing_units
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AM ... sing_units

I condensed those two pages into the table in the CODE block in this post:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=94462#p1211157