Is FX 8320 really much better than an old Athlon II x3 455 for gaming or , is it better to save for a I5 4570

marciokpo

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Hello guys i am planning on buying an FX 8320 for gaming purposes all together with a ASUS M5A97 R2.0 mobo , mainly to use for half or one year with my hd 7850 and then upgrade my gpu to a R9 290 , but i was looking for something price / performance worthy .Now I think my old athlon 455 has been price / performance wise because it costed me 53 dollars 3 years ago and i can run Titanfall on insane textures with 1920 * 1080 at minimum 40 fps , but FX 8320 where i love will cost me 232 Dollars . So my question is ( for users who know about both intel and amd ) what do you think would be the wisest choice ? Wait longer for an i5 or buy this 8 core fx 8320 ?

Thanks :)
 
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If you have a AM3+ board already then the fx-8320 will be a huge boost in performance over the athlon x3. Now an 8320 will need to be overclocked to not bottleneck a 290 card.

Now if you dont have the board then the i5 will be better (granted it will be $80-100 more) but the i5 is a good bit better.

The 8320 is a perfectly good cpu for gaming, but as said it can bottleneck a 290. If you were not going to go for a 290 in the future then I would suggest the 8320 on a performance/$$ standpoint but since you are getting the 290 and it sounds like you need a newer board anwyawy, then the i5 is the better play.
 

marciokpo

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Thanks :) Actually i would have just enough money to buy an fx 8320 plus the m5a97 mobo ( costs $172 more ) next month , my current mobo doesnt support fx 8320 , do you think that perhaps with using the turbo boost of the fx 8320 for boosting it to 4.0 ghz i would have a minimum bottleneck of just a few fps drops with R9 290 ? I've read about a guy who had this combo and got 250 fps out of Counter strike GO . If not then what Intel better processor could i buy for same price ?
 
An i3 would be a step down for the same price of the 8320.
If you are looking at the price range then the 8320 is hands down the best for that dollar value.

When you get the 290 then you can OC to a a slightly higher speed then the 4.0 and you should be fine, just need to get a better cooler then the stock one. The Hyper 212 EVO is nice but it is a little big so it does not fit in all cases.
 


That really more of depends on the games he's playing. In some games, Like Thief, Assassin's Creed series, Batman Arkham, nearly all MMOs, etc, an i3 can actually outscore a mildly overclocked FX-8320 or a stock FX-8350 in framerates. Either an i3 or an FX-8320 is obviously going to bottleneck an R9 290 in some games, but the i3s perform comparably overall and do offer a better upgrade path, since he'd have to buy a new motherboard anyway.
 

marciokpo

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Thanks boosted and Rationale ,

Boosted : yeah right ? what could go wrong if say i get the 8320 and a time later overclock it to 4.2 or 4.3 ghz , if i have 2 coolers near my cpu or a Hyper 212 evo cooler + another cooler next to it i may void the warranty but there's no chance of overheating and burning the processor is that right?

Rationale : I always go and try for the most demanding games and think if i buy an intel processor it will be i5 or up , my only "whim" is that i dont quite trust about hyperthreading and instead right now i prefer 8 amd cores for future games , but it doesnt matter a lot right ? apart from the quantity of cores it matters more the performance a i5 could give on all games i believe . And furthermore what do you think about what boosted said , an fx 8320 with 4.2 ghz can handle well a 290 with minimum bottleneck or No Chance at All?

summary: i was thinking of getting a good boost in my rig for the less money i can waste to play demanding coming games like Battlefield Hardline and Call of duty Advanced Warfare ( i got a hd 7850 ) and im not gonna waste around 770 bucks for a R9 290 in a loong time, So with this in mind Do i still go for an i5 + mobo or fx 8320 + mobo is good enough ? ^^
 


The FX-8320 won't keep up with an R9 290, period. The FX-8320 is firmly comparable to the i3-4330; AMD does not have a CPU comparable to the i5s. If you want to play the most demanding games at the highest possible framerates, you'll need an i5, no two ways about it. As for 'next-gen gaming' with ports from the X1 and PS4, the FX-8000 CPUs are falling behind the i3s, not keeping up.

CPU_01.png

http--www.gamegpu.ru-images-stories-Test_GPU-Action-Dead_Rising_3-test-dr_3_proz.jpg

570x421xbattlefield-4-fps2.png.pagespeed.ic.1d8vhdafmu.png
 

marciokpo

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That was really helpfull it made me understand how the fx 8320 wont possibly keep up with that board , but then i thought it deep and decided to make another buy later if i ever go for a r9 290 ( in fact i doubt it a little ) and when i go for that card i ll take an i7 with full 8 threads available . So my tiny concern now is , how many FPS do you think i would lose between a 8350 and a 8320 ? Here in this pic http://www.xbitlabs.com/images/cpu/fx-8350-8320-6300-4300/borderlands2.png it shows an 6300 FPS is similar as the 8320 fps , and in the pic you showed me about Dead Rising 3 the min FPS of a fx 6300 were 46 that's 4 less than the 8350 . Does this mean there's only a 4 FPS gap between the fx 8320 and the fx 8350 or... the gap is more like 10 fps ?

I ask cus i'm scared about overclocking and voiding the warranty stuff and perhaps burning the cpu or mobo , would bumping the multiplier for FX 8320 to 4.0 ghz in this mobo M5A97 R2.0 be a good idea with 2 cheap coolers next to the heatsink or it would get my cpu/mobo killed ?

Thanks for the helpfull advice so far !
 


There will only be a small difference between the FX-8320 and the FX-8350. The reason is because the FX-8320 is literally the same chip as the FX-8350. The only difference is that the FX-8350 is overclocked a bit from the factory. They have the same cache, the same FPUs, same integer units, all the hardware is the same. The only difference is that the FX-8320 is at 3.5Ghz, and the FX-8350 is at 4Ghz. Literally the only difference.

Because of that, as a general rule, if a motherboard will handle an FX-8350, it can handle an FX-8320 clocked to 4Ghz. You just have to be careful not to set the voltage significantly higher than the FX-8350's for that rule to work as expected.

As for the FX-6300 versus the FX-8320... It depends.
The newer FX CPUs like the FX-8320 or the FX-6300 all use the Piledriver architecture. Piledriver CPUs don't use 'regular' cores, they use modules. Each module has 2 cores in a pair, but each core shares resources and suffers a speed penalty when using more than 1 core per pair.

How it works is, the FX-6300 gets a normal performance increase for every core up to 3 cores. However, as the last 3 cores are activated, the modules start to share resources and develop latency, due to the cost-cutting nature of the Piledriver architecture. The last 3 cores of the FX-6300 only help performance slightly, since they have to share power with the first 3 cores.

FX-6300
Core 1 - +100 performance
Core 2 - +100 performance
Core 3 - +100 performance
Core 4 - +25 performance
Core 5 - +25 performance
Core 6 - +25 performance

The FX-8320 is similar, but it has one more module. This means the FX-8320 gets normal increases up to the first 4 cores, but the last 4 cores suffer a penalty. This allows the FX-8320 to perform better than the FX-6300 even in games that use just 4 cores.

FX-8320
Core 1 - +100 performance
Core 2 - +100 performance
Core 3 - +100 performance
Core 4 - +100 performance
Core 5 - +25 performance
Core 6 - +25 performance
Core 7 - +25 performance
Core 8 - +25 performance

Intel uses a more traditional architecture. Their cores are "real" cores, so they perform as expected without speed penalties on their cores. Additionally, Intel's cores and architecture are more set up to handle real-time tasks like gaming. HT threads are automatically used in any games that supports enough threads, but only provide a moderate performance boost, since they simply reduce latency and clearly do not actually add more resources. Clearly, if a game does not use 6-8 threads, an i7 will not benefit from HT, but Intel's individual cores are much stronger regardless, which is usually a much better method of CPU optimization for gaming.

i3-4330
Core 1 - +200 performance
Core 2 - +200 performance
HT Thread 1 - +25 performance
HT Thread 2 - +25 performance

i5-4690
Core 1 - +200 performance
Core 2 - +200 performance
Core 3 - +200 performance
Core 4 - +200 performance

This is all very vague and whatnot, and the numbers are never perfectly accurate, nor this clean, but it's approximately how it works out. If all 8 cores were used perfectly, an FX-8320 could marginally be ahead of an i3-4330. However, 8 cores are never used 'perfectly', since that's practically impossible in real time applications like games. As a result, the stronger per-core performance of Intel CPUs maintains higher and more consistent real-world framerates.
 
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marciokpo

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Thanks Boosted for the first advice and Rationale , it was more usefull to know better what i was buying and i got to know intel with these performance estimated points would be double better than an FX . So i bought my fx 8320 today and instead of buying a 290 later i saved the money for an intel and laater on im gonna buy a r9 280 or a 7970 that will be a good combo if im not wrong :) Thanks again guys for the teaching ! Do any of you play Left 4 dead 2 in steam ? lol