i3-6100 vs overclocked fx-8320e?

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CreativeName2078

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Mar 5, 2016
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The i3 would obviously be better upgrading wise, seeing as am3+ is pretty much dead. But in terms of pure gaming performance is there going to be a noticeable difference either way.

Thanks in advance for any help.
 
Solution
photonboy
1) *Only some motherboards allow the i3-6100 to be overclocked.
I know of at least one from Gigabyte, though I think Asus has NONE. Some motherboards that DID support it also disabled this in BIOS updates.

I forget the model, but I know of one guy that got 4.3GHz fairly easily. Sounds great right? Sure, but it's really only about a 16% though at least it's a "free" increase and with a dual-core you want all you can get.

**Look for boards that support this, and check their BIOS updates to see if they've disabled it. You can always roll back to previous BIOS versions but then you lose any other fixes.

2) PERFORMANCE DIFFERENCE?

That depends a lot as you probably know on how many cores can be utilized. For a lot of games we can go by...
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Ecky

Ecky

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Feb 3, 2013
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In some games that can utilize all of the threads, an overclocked 8320e will be faster, but it will probably only be an academic matter at that point - both CPUs will deliver good performance.

By the time you've bought an overclocking motherboard, aftermarket cooler, paid more for the FX CPU (it's $25 more than the i3 on Newegg), and bought a slightly bigger power supply, you might as well have bought a stock i5, which would easily be no-contest in every metric.
 
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photonboy

photonboy

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Jun 20, 2006
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1) *Only some motherboards allow the i3-6100 to be overclocked.
I know of at least one from Gigabyte, though I think Asus has NONE. Some motherboards that DID support it also disabled this in BIOS updates.

I forget the model, but I know of one guy that got 4.3GHz fairly easily. Sounds great right? Sure, but it's really only about a 16% though at least it's a "free" increase and with a dual-core you want all you can get.

**Look for boards that support this, and check their BIOS updates to see if they've disabled it. You can always roll back to previous BIOS versions but then you lose any other fixes.

2) PERFORMANCE DIFFERENCE?

That depends a lot as you probably know on how many cores can be utilized. For a lot of games we can go by the SINGLE THREAD value. Let's compare:

i3-6100 http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i3-6100+%40+3.70GHz

FX-8320e https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+FX-8320E+Eight-Core

So..
At stock settings, the i3-6100 single thread is about 1.55X faster.

*A lot of games suffer when a single CPU core can't keep up with the MAIN GAME THREAD of code. Having a CPU core that is over 50% faster helps with this.

Note that DX12 when properly coded for will help use most of the CPU at times, but this will NOT help with existing games, nor is there any guarantee that enough of the FX-8320e would actually be used for it to benefit. Further, DX12 games are not going to be the majority of upcoming titles for quite some time.

TOTAL processing:
The game or application has to use at least 75% approx before the FX-8320e is the better choice. (and it can even have a higher average FPS but stutter more due to the single core periodically being a bottleneck... it gets confusing).

Summary:
This is very oversimplified as there are other factors, but in general the i3-6100 is a far better choice for most games.
 
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CreativeName2078

Commendable
Mar 5, 2016
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I am planning to upgrade very fairly soon, so I'm not going to go out of my way to find a board to oc the i3 if I am just going to get an unlocked i5 in a couple of months.
Anyway thanks for your help, based on what you and others have said, I'll go with my original choice the i3.
 
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