athlon 750K and SSD or fx-6300 and no SSD

go for fx-6300 and a decent 970 chipset motherboard... -you can add SSD later + they are constantly getting cheaper

Depend on your graphic card..

if you use a decent graphic card..
6300k no ssd will lead to better fps in gaming, and faster processing power
750k and ssd will lead to faster load in application, but slower processing power and lower fps..

I'd go for the FX-6300 and no SSD. You can always just add an SSD at a later date. An SSD will only make a difference whilst gaming in loading levels and things like that.

well ssd is noticeable on daily use and internet browsing too... windows 8 boots very fast as well - but it's nothing to die for...
if you get hdd and plan to add ssd later - make sure your sata controller is set to AHCI mode in bios before you install windows - the ssd will need that if you want to just transfer the existing windows installation onto the ssd without reinstall...

Well, for gaming the FX-6300 would be faster overall. I think the Athlon 750K would provide a large bottleneck in CPU bound games (so does the FX-6300, I would know because I have one, but it's quite clearly more efficient than the Athlon 750K). The SSD increases boot times and if you put certain programs on it, it can be tremendously fast! I mean, while the boot time aspect is fairly impressive on its own, that's not what convinced me I should get an SSD (I don't have one yet, but I'll get one when I have a chance). What convinced me were the loading times of applications. If you load browsers, Steam, essentially any program onto an SSD, the load times of said applications are practically instantaneous. It's crazy. With boot times, versus an HDD we're talking about a decrease from let's say 50 seconds to something like 25 seconds. Certainly nothing to scoff at, but for applications like let's say google chrome, we're talking about 5 seconds on an HDD to bring up the browser and (assuming internet bandwidth is not a bottleneck) load the page fully while on an SSD it's done in about .2 seconds. You can certainly feel it for daily applications, just not for gaming.

So here's what I suggest. If you buy a CPU now, upgrading that CPU later is a bit of a waste. In comparison, if you just use an HDD now, buying an SSD later is an additional component rather than a replacement, so you could potentially have the best of both worlds (a good CPU and an SSD) if you wait it out. So basically, get a good CPU now and then get the SSD later when you can afford to so you don't sacrifice on anything. However, I suggest you do not get an FX-6300. Rather, see if you can extend your budget to an FX-8320. They're excellent. It's the same as an FX-8350, just underclocked, but they're much more affordable than an FX-8350 and you can just overclock later to save a lot of cash. Currently you can get them for $140, which is pretty good considering that's it only $30 away from the FX-6300:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009O7YU56/?tag=pcpapi-20

The two extra logical cores of an FX-8320 make a difference in a lot of CPU bound games. Some will argue, "games don't use more than 4 cores". Well that's true in most cases. The thing is, that's for physical cores (which Intel uses). AMD uses inferior logical cores which borrow resources from another. Essentially, logical cores are more like threads, so it's more accurate to compare 8 logical cores to 4 physical cores, meaning an FX-6300 is more comparable to 3 physical cores. So yes, for a lot of games you will see the advantage to having 8 cores.

I mean that in gaming the only difference will be loading times. I realise that boot times and general snappiness will improve with an SSD.

is it really that bad? most benchmarks suggest a 1-5% difference between 8350 and 6350 in games... (6300 vs 6350 kinda the same thing as 8320 vs 8350) - i got the 6350 myself and i kinda feel bad i didn't get the 8320... but like i said... i don't see anything online that suggests there's a huge difference in gaming...

Benchmarks always seem so finicky. I should note, caveat emptor, part of this is my own theory. But some benchmarks show a huge difference between the two while others literally show a difference of 1 fps. It's very hard to pinpoint exactly what the main determining factor is, but it is clear that in at least some benchmarks, the FX-8320/50 is a far better buy. Take a look at this benchmark for BF4:



It's clear in this that the difference in core count helps a lot. I don't think the extra 500 MHz between the 8350 and the 6300 makes a big difference, because as you can see the 4300 has a higher clock speed than the 6300, yet it does considerably more poorly even though it also has the same architecture, so I hypothesize that the difference comes from the 2 cores.

UPDATE: I also see a lot more direct comparison of the i5-3570k/i5-4670k vs the FX-8350 (the former two CPUs win easily) than I do between Intel CPUs and the FX-6300. My major issue with the FX-6300 is not necessarily the average frame rate, but rather my minimums. In CPU bound games, I have decent frame rates for a good time, but then for whatever reason I get a noticeable spike as a result of a CPU bottleneck. I'm hoping that the FX-8320 eliminates this minimum or at least mitigates it greatly, and from what I've heard it seems to do so.

Nope, it's not exactly the same thing..
8350 has better binning..and it's lead to better overclock result..
the processor has fail to reach 8350 clock at certain condition, sell as 8320.



The FX 8xxx does have 8 cores, but each of the cores shares resources with another core. Therefore, one core can be waiting while the other core is busy using those shared resources. The 8xxx has 4 modules each of them contains two cores and the shared resources. it contains two 128-bit FP units which can be combined to form one 256-bit FP unit

The shared resources includes the prefetching module, decoding units, a floating point unit and the L2 cache. This design approach is better than Hyper Threading because HT only "creates" virtual cores.

speaking about that benchmark - hard to say - i think the extra 500mhz will close the gap between it and 8350 alot... atleast when i overclock my 6350 to 4.5 ghz it becomes noticeably more snappy... too bad i still don't have a proper cooler and gpu to get real gaming results... but that will come in a few weeks... (as will 5 ghz hehe, unless i have a dud of a cpu) i think there's a bigger gap between 4 to 6 core than 6 to 8 core in game performance since 4 cores can be used up fully no problem... but you still have windows and other tasks in the background that probably benefits from "something extra" over 4 cores...

-update: just look at the 8350 vs 9370 in that chart... the extra mhz help alot...

generally yes but not 100% true - in games that do alot of object loading while you move around it can improve fps a little or just reduce stutter because you have almost instant access to that data...
but yes the fx6300 and adding ssd later is the way to go