Intel i3 4170 or amd fx 6300 ?

Do you already have a Mobo? How about GPU, what system will these go in? What games will you play.

What is you budget?

Skylake I3's should ship end of September I think.

Edit: with a $600 budget do you mean for all the parts or just CPU and Mobo?

My best suggestion for you would be to wait a little over a week. On August 14, Intel will ship its Skylake processors. You won't want to get one of those, because they are targeting enthusiasts first, starting with Core i5 and Core i7. So bit too much, but it might knock the price of current CPUs down $10 or $20. Given it is just one week away, you don't have much to lose by waiting.

As for which to go with, I'd advise going Intel. A Core i3 won't do too bad for you.

That is probably best. Honestly, at $600, you are close to being able to afford one of the lower-end Core i5 CPUs right now, so it is very likely that if prices drop a good $20 or so between the CPU, motherboard, or RAM you could make it work. Post back here in a week or so and we can pick back up where we left off and see what we can find price wise.

That is probably best. Honestly, at $600, you are close to being able to afford one of the lower-end Core i5 CPUs right now, so it is very likely that if prices drop a good $20 or so between the CPU, motherboard, or RAM you could make it work. Post back here in a week or so and we can pick back up where we left off and see what we can find price wise.

Yes like the top people above said. Those little AMD processors aren't bad, sometimes on a tighter budget that is the best thing to go with. I'd probably push it and say after $400-$450 that they aren't worth it anymore. I'd personally avoid them unless I was building a non-gaming system designed for basic web browsing and office work. In that scenario I feel that it offers more value than the competing Intel Pentium chips as it can handle more threads, but for gaming there is a sizable drop when you move from a Core i3 or FX 6300 down to that, and it is really better to not do it.

This isn't accurate. Essentially all games will run on a dual-core, just recommended settings are usually quad-cores. In fact games can't actually tell the difference between hyper-threaded cores and real cores. Performance is lower on the hyper-threaded cores relative to a real quad-core CPU, but the game doesn't have any way to know the difference.

More to the point, even if such a limitation existed, the FX 6300 wouldn't help. These AMD CPUs aren't really 4, 6, and 8 core units. They are half that.

Inside of a traditional type of CPU are numerous pieces. Two of the main units are the floating point units (FPU) and the integer units. A single CPU core has one of each. AMD came to the conclusion that FPU was less important, and when designing these CPUs, they opted to mix this 1:1 ration up, by placing one FPU for every integer unit. So two of AMD's CPU cores are closer to being 1.5 CPU cores.

Well things get worse for AMD, as they went for a design that emphasizes high clock speeds over IPC, even though it isn't capable of exceptionally higher clock speeds. The problem here is that comparing one AMD core to one Intel core isn't even close. One Intel core performance about twice as fast as an AMD CPU core.

Overall, the AMD CPU tends to perform a little better than Intel Core i3 when you are heavily multi-tasking, as it can run more threads (think of one thread, as a single application) at the same time. The Intel CPU on the other hand with hyper-threading would be running essentially four threads at the same time, but each of those threads would be working much faster. (This is incredible simplified, but gets the general idea across) Whenever you are only doing a moderate level of multi-tasking or you are playing a game, you will find the Core i3 to provide superior performance though.

Long story short, if either of them has a performance advantage, it would probably be the Core i3, but that performance advantage isn't so great that the FX 6300 doesn't get advised from time to time because, because it does sell for a good price, and still does reasonable performance.

You might try checking on the prices you can find for them and low-end Core i5 CPUs now. The prices on these units might of dropped a little early in anticipation of Skylake.