Some questions about AMD Cpu's

Lots of questions. The AMD roadmap is a hard one to predict. I was a die hard AMD fan for many many years. AMD announced they will no longer compete with Intel for "fastest" CPU.

I have now moved to Intel for the first time in 15+ years.

My question to you is, are you looking to OC AMD only?

What are you looking to do with the PC?

1. No.

2. No plans and almost no point for those revisions to be brought to the 6/8-core lineup

3. A few Front-End improvement, up to 20% higher performance in branching (which is rarely used, so). All in all, we are talking about the same amount of improvement compared to the transition from Bulldozer to Piledriver (3% IPC average, at best), whereas the architecture itself is less efficient than Piledriver (due to using more units, more transistors) as it is barely faster per cycle. 28nm SHP vs. 32nm SOI is what makes Steamroller consume a little less power effectively, but it does not allow for those chips to be pushed as hard.

4. According to rumours, Excavator will be used in APUs only; Carrizo (Excavator-APU for FM2+) is supposed to have 20nm stacked EDRAM, but this will, at best, result in better iGPU performance (unless HSA is more commonly used). The chip itself is still 28nm, but provides better efficiency than Kaveri (Steamroller).

5. Well, 2012 (Piledriver)→2015(Excavator might be, at best, a 10% improvement in performance for AMD's chips (note that this is an assumption) on their 4-core APUs for FM2+. AM3+ is on live-support, since both AMD and Intel, from 2012 until 2015, are increasing their chips speed by less than 15%, it is power consumption that should be the matter here. For gaming, the AMD chips are fine, especially with a moderate overclock.

6. The point in the 9370 and the 9590 was to provide higher-end chips that were basically overclocked 8320/8350s. Those were cherry-picked, so they will, in most cases, be better for overclocking, especially on sub-zero cooling solutions. But there is still a lot of OC friendly, "lower-end" Vishera 8-cores out, so this is more about making more money with essentially the same product.

7. Kaveri uses Steamroller, Vishera is Piledriver. Carrizo will use Excavator. Since the improvements are mostly for higher efficiency (although Steamroller itself was less effective in that manner), Piledriver is your only option if you are looking for an AMD rig with DDR3-RAM.

8. How should we know? There are not done with Athlon yet, so we'll have to see. It is just branding anyway.

9. 150 pounds? us dollars? euros? The ASRock 990FX Killer is a decent board, as it has just recently been released. Should do the job for OC aswell.

10. See 11

11: If you get a good chip, you could be sitting at around 150W, if your chip is bad, you could be looking at 200W+, if you can get your chip stable at all. Recommended maximum voltage is 1.45V for a 24/7 overclock.

I personally got an FX-6300, sitting at 4.5GHz. Seems to be either a terrible sample or my motherboard can't do shit (probably both), so it required 1.5V just to pass stability tests.
My cooler is a be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 2, CPU sits at around 60°C.
If you get lucky with your chip, you can stay at a safe voltage (1.45V) and possibly even hit 4.7-4.8GHz with it.
I'd take the FX over the i3, gives you a lot of additional performance, especially for multitasking and upcoming games.

By the way, there is also board that are a little cheaper than the 990FX board and will still do a very good job.
Take a look at the ASUS M5A97 EVO R2.0 and M5A97 PRO motherboards. Solid boards for OC on air.


A new x86-architecture is currently in development and is rumoured to surface in 2016-2017, with DDR4-RAM and a new platform. We'll have to see how that goes, but we got the "Keller factor" on AMD's side for this one.

970/FX-6300/260X are the best choice overall. 970 won't hold you back in any kind of way with this setup.