Advice needed: CPU upgrade for gaming PC

For god sakes please do yourself a favor and get an Intel CPU. I can't believe all these people recommending slow AMD CPUs for gaming when games need strong IPC and per core performance and cannot benefit from 8 slow cores.

In gaming there's not much different in frames. We recommend amd because he's on a budget. AMD is just fine. Google any game with these amd cpu they work. AMD 4 life

I'd say at the minute my budget is around £100-£120, about the price range of the aforementioned AMD FX8320 which seems to be higher in performance than a particular i5 Intel CPU a friend of mine is using on the same GPU and claims he never runs into performance problems. Since it is compatible with my board this is probably a good choice as converting board would just cost more money for what I'm asking, I don't fancy dishing out an extra £100 for 10 fps here and there.

I just opened up Wolfenstein (worst running game I own) and my CPU usage averaged at a very consistent 50%. I use my PC for gaming and rarely run anything in the background. Funnily enough, who knew Nvidia's GeForce Experience was such a CPU hog...

Funnily enough, who knew Nvidia's GeForce Experience was such a CPU hog...

I doubt it, I just tried overclocking my current GPU (using AMD Overdrive) and Far Cry 4 crashes on start-up until it is reverted. I read somewhere that AMD Overdrive isn't the proper way of doing things, haven't ever really dabbled with overclocking. Maybe now would be a good time to start. Which card are you recommending exactly here? If the 8320 will allow me to run games at a consistent framerate MUCH better than my current CPU then I'd be content with not spending any extra than £100.

I'm not an AMD expert at all, but I'll give you my 2 cents. It seems like, in general, the 6300 is just one step down from the 8320/8350 class, especially if you aren't going to overclock it. That being said, for gaming a stock 6300 will perform around the same as a stock 8320 since they have the same base clock and most games don't use more than 4 cores (I don't know if AMD gets around this somehow, maybe they do), but a stock 8350 will outperform both in gaming. For other things like video editing or multitasking the 8320 beats the 6300 due to more cores.

Essentially it just becomes a price question, the 8320 is apparently an underclocked version of the 8350 but their performance is close enough. The 8320 is technically a better performance per pound chip, and you can always overclock it up to 8350 stock rates at any time with some very simple tweaks.

I'd skip the 6300 if you don't want to overclock extensively - if you are only into gaming you can probably get away with the 6300 and you can always learn to overclock it later, but I'd still go with the 8320 over the 6300; more cores, more cache, a slightly better overclocker, the same game performance, yes it has a higher TDP and a higher price but I'd still go for. Frankly, any of the three chips would be a huge step up over the 4100 and it should stop bottlenecking your GPU. I presume your RAM is high-enough speed that it isn't the problem (1600+). CPU's don't contribute a lot to most modern games, it is more the GPU, so getting rid of the bottleneck is the big thing.

For myself, I would go with the 8350 myself and OC it since the price difference is negligible and AMD aren't very strong CPU's in general so if you want to play nice games especially in the future you'll need all the power you can get, but I'm sure the 8320 will play just fine, it is very close to the 8320 so I doubt that you are losing much, if anything, there. As SR-71 Blackbird above said, make sure that all of your other hardware is compatible with it. 8320 is probably the sweet spot, as s/he said.