AMD FX-6300? Is it good?

Hello,

My budget is around £400

Your post is a joke. The FX-6300 is nearly indistinguishable from an i5 in gaming where the video card is the most important component.

I wouldn't go lower than the 270 as that would be a dead end, forcing him to upgrade at some point not to far in the future.

For his budget, the 6300 would probably be best which is a very capable gaming processor

http://www.alternate.co.uk/AMD/6300/html/product/1038198/

FX 6300 for 76.90 pounds.

or

http://www.alternate.co.uk/Intel%28R%29/i3-4130/html/product/1087498/?

I3 4130 for 78.90.

In the end they are both pretty equal. The main difference is that AMD motherboards are cheaper. The I3 will be little snappier though, while the 6300 is going to be faster in more heavily threaded software.

Anyway, either you pick, will make you happy. During gaming you won't notice the difference. Pair it up with 8GB of RAM and either:

http://www.alternate.co.uk/SAPPHIRE/2GB_Radeon_R9_270/html/product/1111794/?

or

http://www.alternate.co.uk/ASUS/GeForce_GTX_660_DirectCU_II/html/product/1030754/?

//You can probably find better prices somewhere.

of your choice. Look up at what you need. Do your games play better on AMD or on nVid. Look at your software if you use any. Does it use OpenCL (AMD is better here) or CUDA (nVIdia only).

And be happy. At this price, there is no noticeable difference. A lot of the people here at Tom's forget that some people just want to enjoy a computer fitting their budget. The enthusiastic users forget the main point.

[PCPartPicker part list](http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/2GIFD) / [Price breakdown by merchant](http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/2GIFD/by_merchant/) / [Benchmarks](http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/2GIFD/benchmarks/)

Type|Item|Price
:----|:----|:----
**CPU** | [AMD FX-6300 3.5GHz 6-Core Processor](http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/part/amd-cpu-fd6300wmhkbox) | £80.00 @ Ebuyer
**Motherboard** | [ASRock 970 PRO3 R2.0 ATX AM3+ Motherboard](http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/part/asrock-motherboard-970pro3r20) | £51.50 @ Amazon UK
**Memory** | [Corsair 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1333 Memory](http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/part/corsair-memory-cmv8gx3m2a1333c9) | £60.00 @ Amazon UK
**Storage** | [Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive](http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/part/seagate-internal-hard-drive-st1000dm003) | £43.97 @ Dabs
**Video Card** | [Asus GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1GB Video Card](http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/part/asus-video-card-gtx650tidc2o1gd5) | £107.99 @ Ebuyer
**Case** | [Cooler Master K280 ATX Mid Tower Case](http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/part/cooler-master-case-rck280kkn1) | £33.43 @ Amazon UK
**Power Supply** | [XFX ProSeries 450W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply](http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/part/xfx-power-supply-p1450sx2b9) | £34.14 @ Scan.co.uk
| | **Total**
| Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available. | £411.03
| Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-01-24 13:48 GMT+0000 |

This is what I got. Maybe some parts could (should) be found cheaper. Good luck.

I consider that a rumor. Personally, I am still using a Radeon 7770, which I believe to be no match to the R9 260, and I am still doing excellently.


It is always funny how quickly cheap lower-scale CPUs morph into a "very capable gaming processor" once there is a tight budget. Those people that buy all those 8320 or Core i5 must be fools to spend 2x or more the amount of money on their gaming CPU when they could get a "very capable gaming processor" for so little money!

I always endeavor to be honest. The FX-6300 is not a good choice for a gaming machine, yet it may be the best choice his purse allows for and therefore the best available choice for him. That is what I have been saying all the time, and that is what I stick to.

In the end they are both pretty equal. The main difference is that AMD motherboards are cheaper.

Anyway, either you pick, will make you happy.

A lot of the people here at Tom's forget that some people just want to enjoy a computer fitting their budget. The enthusiastic users forget the main point.

Yeah, by less than £4…
Offering a huge future upgrade path up to the very elite of current CPUs, unlike the AMD board that only allows for a moderate step to the 83xx.

Also, while I acknowledge your decision for an aptly-sized PSU rather than a grossly oversized one like so many people suggest on these forums, he may run into problems with this 450W PSU when he upgrades to a power-hungry 83xx CPU later, especially when he overclocks, which is pretty much obligatory for these CPUs. The Intel counterparts are not only faster, they also consume a whole lot less power and any of them will be able to run nicely with the 450W PSU you suggested.


Or unhappy, depending on which games he tries to play.


Perhaps. Or perhaps you forget that users may want to play even the latest games even though their budget is tight, and by telling them what great gaming CPUs the i3 and FX-6300 are you raise unwarranted expectations in them what the CPU they are buying will be able to achieve, expectations that will be dearly disappointed when they own the machine and try their high-end massively-multiplayer game on their new "gaming" processor.

For that reason, I endeavor to remain honest by saying: "Your budget is tight. This is the best you can get for it, and it will be good for quite a number of games, but stay aware that it is still a good leap from the really powerful gaming processors, and there are games out there that will definitely make you feel it!"

People like the thread creator then have the choice to go for it or postpone the purchase and save up for something better. However, if you advise him to simply go for a FX-6300 or i3 and claim that this will do excellently, he will likely believe you and buy the CPU with the same expectations that a buyer of an i5 has.

And I focus on the CPU and not the GPU because this will enable them to play a maximum of games with their new machine. Focussing on the GPU instead will cause them to have a slightly better optics (more details) in less CPU-demanding games and not being able to properly play CPU-demanding games, which is the worse tradeoff, IMHO.

You are basically trying to say that an i5/i7 with a low end gpu is capable of playing most games today, gosh, you have it completely wrong. The gpu takes priority over the cpu which is why many experts on this forum agree that spending more on the cpu than the gpu is not worth it

This is nonsense. True is that once the CPU is fast enough to match all requirements of the game (and I am not talking about the requirements on the package, but what load the game really puts upon the CPU), the gaming experience can only be improved by using a better graphics card that can display the game in greater detail.

That much is true. However, you can get pretty much every - even modern - game to run even with the crappiest of graphics cards, even on-CPU-graphics, by simply toning down the various detail sliders that almost all games offer with a huge variety of detail levels. The game may look less beautiful, perhaps a lot less beautiful if the graphics card is really crappy, but it will run nicely and fluently.

However, there are hardly any CPU-related sliders in modern games that you could slide down. Play a game your CPU is not good enough for, and you are screwed. It is as easy as that.

And no game will look anywhere near crappy on a medium-class Radeon R7 260 card. I can assure you that. The GPU technology is so mature nowadays that even this price class of cards can play games on an impressive graphics level. Unless you plan on connecting multiple or huge (greater than 1920x1080) monitors, that is.

Besides, upgrading a graphics card later simply means uninstall driver, pull out card, put in new card, install driver, done. Goes for any card, even one from a GPU generation that did not yet exist by the time you built your machine.

Now try to upgrade the CPU you saved money upon at a later time somewhere in the future, when new CPU and GPU generations have been released. You can decide being sentenced to buying a CPU of the same generation, already obsolete by the time you buy it, because you need it to fit into your mainboard, or you need to replace the mainboard as well, increasing cost and effort big time. And as if that was not enough, there is also a good chance you will have to buy new RAM, seeing that the next generation of CPUs will work with DDR4.

No, going for as good a CPU as you can afford now and upgrading GPU later when you need it and can afford it is the way better approach.

the new consoles are using 1.6ghz 8 core AMD cpus, with a 7790 in xbox one, and a 7850-7870 in the ps4. I think cpu intensive games are becoming less and less as time goes on, for your average console port it'll have no problem playing on an AMD 6300/8320, and to that fact probably the i3 as well judging from it's good benchmarks. The OP seems to be on a strict budget, it's not like he can never save up in his life to upgrade to an 8350 or an i5 on intel side.