i3 vs fx-6300

Devouringbowl57

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Jun 30, 2014
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I was just wondering for a budget gaming pc build which processor would be better. I would couple it with an r9 280 or gtx 760. I intend to play battlefield 4, modded minecraft, wolfenstein the new order and whatever free games the gpu comes with.
 

clutchc

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Either CPU will be fine with either of those cards. The Hyper Threaded i3 with 2 cores/4 threads or the FX-6300 with 6 (integer) cores/6 threads. The i3 will be slightly faster due to its greater IPC. The FX-6300 is actually more of a dual core with 2 integer processors per core. The one benefit of the i3, would be the option to upgrade to a faster processor than is offered by the FX line. Understand, I'm speaking strictly gaming here.

But to be sure, which i3 are you considering?
 

clutchc

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He probably doesn't have a discrete gfx card. Or a very weak one. Even the older Sandy Bridge i3's are in the same tier as the fastest AMD FX processors when it comes to gaming: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-5.html
 
Solution
Exactly what clutch said.

And i3s have more than enough power for gaming, provided you have a decent video card in your PC. That's a requirement anyway, since the FX-6300 won't even display any picture without a video card.

If you *do* decide on an i3, then this next advice is applicable:
My particular i3-4360 outperforms the FX-8320 in plenty of games, but for price/performance ratio purposes you'd be best off with an i3-4150. The i3-4330 also has a good price/performance ratio, but above that it gets thrown off a bit.
 

cmi86

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Whichever you decide really they are about neck and neck when it comes to gaming. Some games will favor the i3's IPC, other games will favor the 6300 core count (6 threads, 6 integer processing units, 3 floating point units) The 6300 does have some advantages in productivity workloads where it seems to be solidly faster than an i3 at most tasks. The 6300 is also overlockable to the levels of a locked i5, that said doing this requires a more expensive motherboard and CPU cooler pushing the combination cost out of competition with the i3 and close to the price of an i5 combo.