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DBofficial
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AMD Ryzen 5 or AMD FX?

Wed Apr 26, 2017 8:14 am

Hoping for some input as my younger brother wants to upgrade his rig a little.

He is currently a pretty dated set up from roughly 1-2 years ago (parts bought at various times)
Motherboard: MSI - A88XM Gaming.
CPU: AMD Athlon X4 880k (shockingly the top supported CPU)
GFX: 2GB Gigabyte Radeon R7 360 OC Edition (6500mhz GDDR5, 1200Mhz GPU, 768 streams)
Ram: 16GB (2x 8gb) Consair DDR 3 Vengeance (2400Mhz)

It does him fine but as a rising streamer and video editor, his system has aged alot faster than it would for a normal gamer.

Now I find myself torn over which CPU to base the upgrade around? AMD Ryzen 5 1400 or AMD FX 8370 Wraith edition. Both are the same price, the FX seems considerably more powerful but the Ryzen would require an AMD4 socket board which is a bit more futureproof?

Any suggestions?
 
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Re: AMD Ryzen 5 or AMD FX?

Wed Apr 26, 2017 8:28 am

Ryzen is going to be much more powerful.
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Re: AMD Ryzen 5 or AMD FX?

Wed Apr 26, 2017 8:34 am

Looks like the 1400 wins in benches, though I haven't checked all of them. The 1400 would be upgradable down the line as well and that's always good for a new build.

Coming from an A88XM+A10-7850K myself I know it would bug the crap out of you to have a decent new machine that can't really be upgraded.
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Re: AMD Ryzen 5 or AMD FX?

Wed Apr 26, 2017 8:45 am

To me, for high performance systems like these, Ryzen has basically made the old FX series obsolete overnight. Between the vastly better IPC and the more modern platform.

I wouldn't bother with the FX line at all any more. The quicker the APUs get replaced with Zen cores the better (though there were more modern platform wise).
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Re: AMD Ryzen 5 or AMD FX?

Wed Apr 26, 2017 8:46 am

With the FX, you could carry the perfectly fine 2x8GB RAM forward. Whereas, everything is DDR4 now, so with AM4 you would have to buy new RAM too but in a few years, that DDR4 could be used in new system.

It's just really not worth it to go with older tech. Simple example, Ryzen will be better performance, but its 65W versus 125Watt TDP of FX. Much less heat/noise. Also, 1500X would be better as its only a few $ more and it has 16MB of L3 cache(double), likely make good difference for min fps type scenarios and heavy multi-tasking.

Realistically, you should not be spending 2017 dollars on 2012 tech.
 
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Re: AMD Ryzen 5 or AMD FX?

Wed Apr 26, 2017 8:48 am

Speaking as someone who's run FX kit for four years and been happy with it for my use cases: don't even hesitate, go Ryzen.
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DBofficial
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Re: AMD Ryzen 5 or AMD FX?

Wed Apr 26, 2017 8:51 am

Ok thank you guys! I was more or less looking for support in my suggestion for him to opt for Ryzen 5, I don't think he'll argue the clock speed with all of us now haha.

It's also a good experiment for me as i'm sorting my own upgrade from the A10-7870k which is maxed out in my rig and has no more room for growth. My own plan was Ryzen 5 but I was concerned with the lack of decent boards on the market during my price up the other month.
 
DBofficial
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Re: AMD Ryzen 5 or AMD FX?

Wed Apr 26, 2017 9:03 am

Rather than start a new thread, only two chipsets are available for Ryzen in Micro-ATX size. A320 or B350, I assume the B350 is the best option as its aimed at overclocking and higher perfomance over plug-n-play type support. Either chipset had any bad press lately?
 
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Re: AMD Ryzen 5 or AMD FX?

Wed Apr 26, 2017 9:28 am

DBofficial wrote:
AMD Ryzen 5 1400 or AMD FX 8370 Wraith edition. Both are the same price, the FX seems considerably more powerful but the Ryzen would require an AMD4 socket board which is a bit more futureproof?

It is rather difficult to justify building an FX system these days, unless money is really tight (so re-using the RAM is a make-or-break factor), or you've got a line on a cheap/free used AM3+ motherboard and an FX CPU. I certainly wouldn't buy any NEW Socket AM3+ gear (or DDR3 RAM) at this point.

AM3+ isn't futureproof at all. AMD hasn't released anything for it in years, it doesn't support DDR4 RAM, and the chipset is literally a half decade old (no native USB3, for example).

Go Ryzen or go Intel.
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sircharles32
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Re: AMD Ryzen 5 or AMD FX?

Wed Apr 26, 2017 9:45 am

If your brother was already using a socket AM3+ motherboard, I'd say it would be a no-brainer - Get the FX, as it would allow you to use the rest of the setup.
However, since he's on an unrelated socket, it would require repurchasing most base components anyway. As others have already stated, going AM3+, allows you to continue to use the same memory. At this point though, I don't really think it's worth it, just to save the memory. In your brother's situation, I'd buy into Socket AM4, with a Ryzen 5 1400. Any overclock you achieve would be more meaningful, compared to the FX-8370, do to it's weaker single threaded nature.

Having said that, I was in a similar boat. The difference was that I was already running a socket AM3+ board. Because of that, I couldn't rationalize spending $400-$500, for a Ryzen rebuild, versus just dropping $125 on an FX-8350 (at the time). If your brother was in a situation similar to mine, I'd recommend staying with the older architecture (unless cost/budget was not a concern).
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Re: AMD Ryzen 5 or AMD FX?

Wed Apr 26, 2017 9:46 am

Another vote Ryzen 5 over FX.

AM4 B350 for sure. There aren't a whole lot of choices on newegg for mATX B350 boards, but they all look solid. Basically can't go wrong.
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Re: AMD Ryzen 5 or AMD FX?

Wed Apr 26, 2017 11:36 am

DBofficial wrote:
Rather than start a new thread, only two chipsets are available for Ryzen in Micro-ATX size. A320 or B350, I assume the B350 is the best option as its aimed at overclocking and higher perfomance over plug-n-play type support. Either chipset had any bad press lately?

I would recommend buying B350 just so you know you aren't getting the cheapest budget motherboard possible.

B350 mobos will also have better I/O options along with the ability to overclock.
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ptsant
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Re: AMD Ryzen 5 or AMD FX?

Thu Apr 27, 2017 2:16 am

DBofficial wrote:
Hoping for some input as my younger brother wants to upgrade his rig a little.

He is currently a pretty dated set up from roughly 1-2 years ago (parts bought at various times)
Motherboard: MSI - A88XM Gaming.
CPU: AMD Athlon X4 880k (shockingly the top supported CPU)
GFX: 2GB Gigabyte Radeon R7 360 OC Edition (6500mhz GDDR5, 1200Mhz GPU, 768 streams)
Ram: 16GB (2x 8gb) Consair DDR 3 Vengeance (2400Mhz)

It does him fine but as a rising streamer and video editor, his system has aged alot faster than it would for a normal gamer.

Now I find myself torn over which CPU to base the upgrade around? AMD Ryzen 5 1400 or AMD FX 8370 Wraith edition. Both are the same price, the FX seems considerably more powerful but the Ryzen would require an AMD4 socket board which is a bit more futureproof?

Any suggestions?


As an owner of an FX8350 and a Kaveri 860K I have to say that it really, really isn't worth it buying the FX in any context other than an in-place upgrade. There may be exceptions if you find some incredible sale at -50% for FX+MB, but that's not what we are talking about.

In my experience, for many, many tasks the Kaveri will very closely match the 8350. Sure, the 8350 is faster for very well-behaved multi-threaded applications, but there are situations in which the opposite is, surprisingly, true. To give you an example, a common bioinformatics task I run on both machines takes (for a given input) ~500min on the Kaveri 860K and ~420min on the FX8350 and includes a lot of parallel code. That would probably be one of the most favorable comparisons for the FX. Would you upgrade a whole system for +15% (and a lot more power consumption--the Kaveri is 28nm)?

I also bought a Ryzen and I haven't had the time to write something here, but let's say that it's another class of hardware. Buy the Ryzen 1600 if you can afford it. If not, wait to get some more money. Prices also seem to have dropped slightly after launch.

Buy the Ryzen 1600.
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