AMD to Intel switch recommendations for gaming?

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B3nchm4rk

B3nchm4rk

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Apr 12, 2013
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AMD has been good to me over the years, but I'm looking for something more powerful and classy right of the box, so I'm converting to Intel.

At the moment I'm sporting an AMD Phenom II X6 1035T, 8 GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600, an EVGA GTX 660 SC (possibly going to SLI later), and a WD 650GB SATA II HDD (I plan on purchasing a SSD in the near future for boot and games).

I was foolish and purchased the 1035T a couple years ago while only paying attention to the cores and not realizing it was a 2.8 GHz LOCKED cpu. "Ooooooh, six cores! /impulse buy" I believe is exactly how it happened.

Anyway, I'm looking at the Ivy Bridge series, and I'm torn between the i5-3570K, and the i7-3770k. There's quite a large gap in price, and while I'm not opposed to spending the extra $100, I really want to know if it's justifiable for the performance gains gaming-wise (Hyperthreading IS tempting).

So given my setup, what would you all suggest? Thanks.
 
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Sakkura

Sakkura

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Aug 22, 2011
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It's hard to justify $100 for hyperthreading just for gaming. There are a few games where it'll help - Crysis 3 comes to mind - but generally the 3570K is plenty powerful enough for gaming. Those $100 would do a lot more good invested in graphics.

Anyhow... does your Phenom II actually hold you back at the moment? Because if it's still doing alright, you might consider getting that second GTX 660 first. You can always upgrade the platform later, and after all Haswell is just around the corner now.
 
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royalcrown

royalcrown

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Personally I went with the I7 because it is faster in games thatr can take advantage of hyper threading, but a lot of games don't really notice it. If you are an "upgrader" go with the I5, if you keep your systems till they are pretty old (or "forever" even ) go with the I7. If you want to do stuff like run virtualbox go i7, if you don't care i5.

Also I'd recommend getting a new motherboard as neither CPU will fit in your current one ;). Hey, you never said you were changing motherboards...hehe
 
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Danra

Danra

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Last June I built a new gaming machine, keeping only the now over two year old ATI HD 6950 video card, which still plays games fine. I would not suggest that card at the moment, as your card can outperform mine in some games. Keep that video card and go SLI if you need to in the future.

My computer specs are listed in my signature below. Note that for gaming the Intel i7-3770 does not perform any better than the i5-3570, especially if you plan to overclock the CPU, which I do. I leave the video card at stock speed.

Also, note that for most games overclocking the CPU does not help, it does help with games that use the CPU heavily, and it is easy to find which games do that.

The Game-O-Meter http://www.yougamers.com/games/ does a fairly good job of determining if your computer will run a specific game. The only problem with that site is some companies do not include data for lots of eye candy; if they do not, then you can assume a more powerful computer is needed. It is a very good web site, however.

Edit: I just noticed my signature does not contain my entire system, so I will delete it, however, hover your mouse over my avatar and you can scroll down to view my system.
 
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babernet_1

babernet_1

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Pardon me for butting in, but how do you like the Noctua NH-C14? Everyone seems to use the NH-D14, but the C14 seems better.
 
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Danra

Danra

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The NH-C14 is actually a little cooler than the D14, though not by much. Also, the NH-C14 blows air down on RAM and chips on the motherboard, helping to cool them.

If you have very tall sticks of RAM you can use one fan [the top one to blow through the fins], it is almost as cool with 1 fan on top, but I use both fans, and they came with the cooler. I have 2 sticks [8GB] of G.Skill Ripjaw X RAM http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231538 and the bottom fan clears them by about 1/4 inch.

You can look at the height of RAM by going to the manufacturer's web page or look it up on newegg.com, as they list most important info. I do not think they have links to manufacturers as they used to.
 
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babernet_1

babernet_1

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Thanks :)
 
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B3nchm4rk

B3nchm4rk

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Apr 12, 2013
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Well the problem is that I'm still on my AMD board (it's a little dated so it doesn't support both SLI & CFX). I'm fairly sure that my HDD is also part of the problem, but being limited on my ability to fully utilize my CPU is rather annoying. Plus, with SLI, I know performance can take a hit if you're running nVIDIA cards on an AMD chipset, hence another reason for my switch. As far as Haswell goes, I don't particularly care to wait for it. It's the "tick", and I doubt the performance increase will be significant for my usage. Plus, IBs I'm sure will drop as launch approaches.
 
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B3nchm4rk

B3nchm4rk

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Pardon me. That was actually a typo. It's that logic though that is ultimately keeping me on the Sandy Bridge architecture. It fits the age old expression, "If it isn't broken, don't fix it." I'll upgrade probably in a couple years when I feel that the micro-architecture has changed significantly enough to justify the money.
 
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Danra

Danra

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Intel is going after faster video and doing very little regarding CPU number crunching. The weak economy may slow release of new CPUs, as well as video cards from Nvidia and AMD.

In fact, the worsening economy has already caused AMD to release the HD 8000 series much later than it could have, and, again because of the poor economy, it is only an upgraded HD 7000 card, nothing to get excited about.
 
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