InsanelyEpic said:
im looking many different options for my gaming pc build, and ive heard that amd cpu's have much more performance than intel. so ive looked at some amd cpu's and if i were to get a amd fx-8320 @ 4.5ghz, should i get liquid cooling instead of air cooling. if so is liquid cooling really reliable? also my graphics card will be msi twin frozr gtx 780
Everything you have heard is wrong.
First off, the arrangement of execution resources in Vishera is very bad for real-time workloads like gaming compared to the arrangement of execution resources in Haswell CPUs. An i5-4590 on it's stock heatink will match or exceed the performance of the FX-8320@4.5ghz in any game while dissipating a fraction of the power. The FX-8320@4.5ghz will not out-perform the stock clocked i5-4590 in any game. If you observe the actual cost to implement these 2 solutions (with the overclocked AM3+ system requiring a PSU that is at least ~150W larger, and a relatively large HSF ~$50 minimum), you'll come to realize that the FX is not actually any less expensive to implement either, making it very hard to rationalize for a gaming rig.
Core count and ghz are not measures of compute performance. A haswell core is "bigger" in terms of execution resources than an entire piledriver module (2 cores). The Haswell i5, is a few modern BIG cores with execution resources arranged for the shortest possible pipeline length and superb cache performance. The PileDriver design offers twice as many cores, each with less than half the execution resources, and a less refined pipeline and cache access system. The result: Haswell works better for real-time workloads, whose performance does not scale proportionally with inter-core parallelism.
In a compute intensive benchmark, the FX-8320@4.5ghz would beat a stock clocked i5 in many metrics, but that's only when all 8 cores are heavily saturated. Gaming workloads can't scale like that because the workload must adhere to a timeline. The timeline creates a sort of throttle on various tasks that are being performed.
Then there's the E3-1231V3, a CPU that at just 80W offers the parallel workload performance of a 200-220W FX-83XX/9XXX clocked at 4.7GHZ, and more performance per core in lightly threaded workloads than any AMD chip can muster at any sort of daily-usable overclock. It's a $250 chip, but you can spend more than that trying to get an FX chip to match it and still not be there.
Bottom line, Haswell offers more gaming performance for your money with less complication and lower power dissipation at almost every price point right now. In fact, at current pricing, there are very few cases where an AMD build is the more rational choice unless the goal is to have enterprise features at bargain basement prices (ECC/IOMMU) or if the user is simply after the novelty of running the odd duck platform.
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Secondly, what most people call "air" coolers, often are actually liquid coolers. An HSF with heatpipes is a liquid cooler. The difference between a liquid cooler with a pump/radiator and a heatpipe liquid cooler, is the way the liquid is pumped. In the heatpipe cooler, the liquid is "pumped" by a thermally induced phase change cycle. In the AIO CLC, the liquid is pumped by a motor driven impeller. Both systems use a copper to liquid heat exchange at the CPU and are VERY effective. decibel for decibel and size for size, heatpipe coolers are very comparable in performance to AIO CLCs.
If you pull the loud fans off an AIO CLC and install them on a heatpipe cooler of similar size that ships with quiet fans, the heatpipe cooler will suddenly perform nearly on par with the AIOCLC.
There are some tradeoffs to each type of cooler, but if given the choice based on my experience with both I would go with a large heatpipe cooler as I believe they offer more cooling for the money and typically come configured with less noisy fans.