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.