AMD Athlon II X4 750k with R7 260X 2GB

FlyingBadger

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Hello!

I'm building a budged AMD based gaming PC, i'm wandering if AMD Athlon X4 750k will be a good CPU for Sapphire R7 260X 2GB ?
 
Solution
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Pentium G3258 3.2GHz Dual-Core Processor (€57.90 @ Caseking)
Motherboard: ASRock H81M-DGS R2.0 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (€41.60 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Memory: Kingston Fury Black Series 4GB (1 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (€36.99 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Video Card: MSI Radeon R7 260X 2GB Video Card (€119.44 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Total: €255.93
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-09-06 06:23 CEST+0200

logainofhades

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They will work well together, but I would probably suggest an i3 4150 instead. Better overall performance, better upgrade path, less power/heat. If budget doesn't allow for more, then by all means, stick with the Athlon, unless you live near a microcenter.
 

bmacsys

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Those Pentiums are missing many modern instruction sets, are only dual core and aren't even hyper threaded. It may beat the Athlon in poorly threaded games but as an overall cpu the Athlon is better. It won't choke when you have multiple apps open that spawn multiple threads. The Pentium will despite having the stronger cores.
 

FlyingBadger

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Hey! Thanks for the answer. Video card, cpu, ram and motherboard would cost about 250 euros for me, i'm not sure if i could spend extra 20 euros to get r7 265
 

logainofhades

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PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Pentium G3258 3.2GHz Dual-Core Processor (€57.90 @ Caseking)
Motherboard: ASRock H81M-DGS R2.0 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (€41.60 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Memory: Kingston Fury Black Series 4GB (1 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (€36.99 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Video Card: MSI Radeon R7 260X 2GB Video Card (€119.44 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Total: €255.93
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-09-06 06:23 CEST+0200
 
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FlyingBadger

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Pentium G3258 has a better single core performance, lower power consumption along with less heat production. But it requires an expensive Z87 motherboard to push the maximum of this processor.
 

mdocod

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Even without hyprethreading, clock for clock a haswell core keeps up with the execution throughput of a PileDriver module almost dead even. This premise that the "quad core" athlon is better prepared for more heavily threaded workloads is largely misguided because it assumes the quad core has more execution resources. The dual core Pentium has the same instruction decoder throughput, access to MORE execution resources, and better cache performance than all 4 cores of the athlon combined. In fact, the "bottleneck" on the execution resources created by the fetch being limited to a single thread per core (no hyperthreading) only manages to slow a haswell core down to the execution performance of an entire PD module (when clocked the same). Point being, both CPUs wind up performing about the same when saturated with many threads to work on.

Since nobody ever seems to compile games in a manner to take advantage of modern instruction sets anyway, there' really no benefit to having those capabilities for a gaming machine. AMD has tons of great features on low end chips... The HSA/hUMA enabled FM2+ platform, AVX instruction capabilities on cheap chips, etc yet nobody is compiling any optimized binaries for games to take advantage of these hardware advancements. It's a bummer, but that seems to be the trend.

That said, both are weak CPUs that can be overclocked to perform similar to an i3, which begs the question, why bother? Unless for the novelty of performance tuning there really isn't much value in that approach. Just use the i3-4150. With hyper-threading enabled, the i3's execution throughput climbs to that of a dual module PileDriver clocked to ~4.4ghz. In real time workloads, the arrangement of execution resources on the i3 is preferable, as any one thread has access to higher execution throughput than it would on the PileDriver architecture.

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To answer the original question. The CPU you choose is going to set the same pace for FPS in compute intensive games no matter what GPU you pair it with. An overclocked Pentium, 750k, or i3, will all have moments in compute intensive games when they will wind up limiting performance to ~30FPS. With that in mind, you should set your FPS expectations somewhat low, and then match a GPU to the resolution, detail settings, and FPS expectations. Notice here that the GPU is not being directly matched to a level of CPU power, in fact, this approach is fundamentally flawed because the render workload is vastly adjustable and varies heavily depending on the monitor resolution.

Assuming the goal is to "match" a GPU to a weak CPU that will sometimes dip to ~30FPS, the solution could be an R7 250X for 720P, R9 270 for 1080P, or R9 290 for 1440P. All 3 of these GPUs are an excellent match to an i3 (or OCed pentium/750K) when used at an appropriate resolution and detail settings to keep the GPU busy.

So, is the 260X a good match to your CPU selection? The answer depends on what sort of games you want to play, at what sort of resolution and detail settings. For 720P with ultra settings, or 1080P with medium settings, it should be a nice match, but if you have FPS goals that exceed what the CPU can deliver, no adjustment to the GPU will ever solve your problem.
 

FlyingBadger

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So is this combo okay to play battlefield 4 on mid-high settings 1080p 30+ fps ?
 

con635

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For bf4 and newer games I'd go with the i3 minimum or athlon 760. Everyone here always recommends the bleeding edge but theres great deals if you look about on ebay/amazon etc on ivy/sandy bridge parts and a quad i5/xeon ivy/sandy would still kill everything mentioned in the thread and last alot longer at gaming.
 

FlyingBadger

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Athlon 760k is just slightly higher clocked so compared to 750k the performance improvement would be minimal. I don't think i3 would be a wise choice since bf4 is 4 cores optimized game.
 

FlyingBadger

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As far as i know hyper-threading is not doubling the cores. I'm not sure if hyper-threaded i3 haswell performs better than athlon 750k
 
Yes it does, its not just about cores, but rather modules. 750k has 4 cores in 2 modules, and i3 has 2 cores w/hyperthreading (virtual cores) in 2 modules. Single core performance of i3 is a lot more than Athlon's, or even FX 4/6 for that matter.

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bmacsys

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Have you ever actually gamed with a Pentium g3258?
 

emdea22

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Yes, i built a system for a friend a couple of weeks ago. Minimum fps is much better than the athlon in all games we tested.
 

FlyingBadger

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I'm getting a bit off topic asking if this build would be good

CPU: Intel i3 4150

Motherboard: Gigabyte LGA1150 GA-H81M-S1

Video card: Sapphire R7 260X 2Gb

RAM: Kingston HyperX FURY 1333Mhz 4x2Gb

PSU: Corsair CX500 500W
 

FlyingBadger

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Is there a difference between 1333Mhz and 1600Mhz ? And can i overclock my current memory ?
 
1600MHz is like the norm for gaming right now, not it doesn't have any (or very slight) increase in performance but the price of 1600Mhz is just a couple of bucks more or maybe even less from 1333Mhz. If you get good enough 1.5V memory from Corsair/ G.Skill, you might have luck in getting 1600MHz from 1333 sticks, and 1866 from 1600 sticks.
 

mdocod

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I don't much care for the GA-H81M-S1 for the following reasons:

1. 3 phase CPU power is bare minimum. (albeit for an i3, this isn't a problem, it just means that this board is going to run very very hot if it is ever upgraded to an i5 or better).
2. 4 pin CPU power connection is physically weak under the tension/weight and natural pull of a typical 4+4 pin power cord. (it's not the power I'm concerned with here, but cable routing putting lots of tension on the connector, here, an 8-pin connection at the board help spread out the leverage that that cables puts on the connector).
3. numerous electrolytic capacitors, appear to be chinese. These increase the chance of premature failure. Slightly nicer boards have all solid caps.
4. Entry level boards like this that are built to the bare minimum are the reason to build instead of buy a pre-made computer. If you're going to use emachine OEM grade parts, then you may as well go to walmart, and buy the pre-built, and let them support the cheap junk. If you buy a bargain basement motherboard and have to provide your own "support" when things go wrong, then you have taken on an burden with no upside. I don't see the point of this. Building yourself affords you the opportunity to weed out mediocrity and do something nice.