mdocod said:
The MSI P34 is apt to blow a VRM or induce major throttling trying to run an FX-8320. Looks like a terrible combination to me. If you're going to cheap out that badly on the motherboard don't bother, it's a waste of your time.
The PSU size should be quite a bit different between a locked i5 build and an FX build. There's nearly a 100W disparity in power dissipation between these 2 platforms at stock clocks under a load, ~200+W if you overclock the FX chip. The locked i5 build can run on a nicely made 550W PSU (and yes, that's enough for a SECOND R9 270X). The FX build should probably have a 750W PSU, and the V750 appears to be very well made and would be a good match to an FX-8320+270X+270X.
All that said, 2x270X doesn't make any sense in a world where the R9 290 exists, as it has precisely double the core config of a 270. All the performance of a 2x270 combo, none of the crossfire penalties. You can save yourself a lot of headache just buy a nice H97 or 970 chipset board now for ~$80-90 and skip the future crossfire plans, then just upgrade the single GPU config in the future, selling the existing GPU at that time. The ASRock Fatality and MSI "gaming" branded H97/B85 boards are worth a look as they offer great quality onboard sound, making them a fantastic value for a gaming rig. For the FX build option, look no further than the 970A-UD3P for $85.
The locked i5-4590/4690 will perform as well as, or better than the overclocked FX-83XX in gaming depending on the specific game. There aren't really any games at this time that will run better on the overclocked FX chip by any margin greater than a margin of error. In older and/or, poorly threaded games with lots of units/players, the i5 will run up to ~30-40% faster (depending on how high the FX is clocked).
On the other hand, the overclocked FX 8 core chip can achieve higher execution throughput than the locked i5 overall. This can't be leveraged by real-time workloads like gaming very well but does free up some available compute resources for use on background tasks. Whether this has a positive effect on gaming is debatable.
The argument for the FX build is the novelty of performance tuning and big superficial numbers.
The argument for the i5 build is the guaranteed top-shelf plug-n-play performance in all sorts of games regardless.
well i think the mobo in fx were a bit too much of me, i did that because i want too evenly macthes the budget between the 2 build. and truthfully i'm a bit biased toward the i5 4590 build over the fx 8320 and i5 4690, since there's only a bit difference performance between the i5 and a more complicated set up of the fx 8320. what makes me hesitate to pick the i5 build were because the amd build + mantle can improve the performance quite significant.
and also i prefer 2x r9 270x crossfire than a single r9 290 since 2 r9 270x only cost around 411.50 dollars and 1 r9 290 cost 466.69 dollars. and from benchmarks review 2x R9 270x crossfire will beat R9 290 in gaming performance