Is it worth upgrading my Phenom x4 970 to FX 8370?

songorocosongo

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Nov 6, 2011
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Hi,

I have had this gaming rig for 3 years and was wondering if I should upgrade to the new generation of AMD cpus. Where I live electricity is $0.27 KW/hr, That's my main reason for not overclocking. I hear the new 8370 is less power hungry and would probably give me a nice boost when gaming. The games I play right now are BF3, BF4 and Alien Isolation. Recently downloaded Planetside 2 but haven't played it. I like to play around with mandlebulb 3d(3d fractal creator and renderer), but not frequently.
 
Solution
The Phenom II X4 970 has a TDP of 125W. The standard FX-8320/50/70 also have a TDP of 125W. So it's not exactly less power hungry.

The FX-8320E/70E however have a TDP of 95W. But they perform worse than the standard versions mentioned above. You'll have to choose between them.

Aside from that, the jump in performance is actually not worth it.. Look at the tier list:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-5.html

The FX-8320E/70E are in the same tier as your current processor. And the FX-8320/50/70 are just one tier above it. Upgrading is only recommended when the difference is three tiers or higher.

NiCoM

Honorable
It would be a good upgrade, i don't know what you had in mind with the MOBO, but you might wan't to change that to atleast a decent chipset 970 AM3+ mobo.
I think you're mistaken something with the CPU, it's the new "E" version which saves you on electricity, the new 8370E and 8320E. Both of these have a pretty low clock speed, but they're gonna clock a single core much higher when the performance is needed, which is what you'll want in most games.

On cpubenchmark.com, the CPU's have the following score:
Phenom x4: 4,453
8320E: 7,484
8370E: 8,019

Either is a big jump in overall performance, so i would say that this is a good upgrade, the 8370E is about 7% faster than the 8320E, so i would probably go for the 8320E here. ;)
 
The Phenom II X4 970 has a TDP of 125W. The standard FX-8320/50/70 also have a TDP of 125W. So it's not exactly less power hungry.

The FX-8320E/70E however have a TDP of 95W. But they perform worse than the standard versions mentioned above. You'll have to choose between them.

Aside from that, the jump in performance is actually not worth it.. Look at the tier list:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-5.html

The FX-8320E/70E are in the same tier as your current processor. And the FX-8320/50/70 are just one tier above it. Upgrading is only recommended when the difference is three tiers or higher.
 
Solution

NiCoM

Honorable
Hmm like NightAntilli is saying, it might not be the biggest of fps boost you'll get from this upgrade, Better CPU's really only help when you have a bottleneck.
Though it will have a bigger performance difference in everything else, general multitasking, video editting, overall using programs, probably also those 3D programs, especially if you want to render using your CPU. Not entirely sure how a GTX660 compares to a FX8370E when rendering a scene.