Is AMD cpu's good for MMO gaming?

Most MMOs run on older and/or less multithreaded engines. So a fast dual core is better than a slow 8-core CPU like the FX-8350.

You could consider a Pentium G4560 or G4600, they should do quite well in MMO gaming. But of course, if you have more money to spend then a Core i5-7600K (or 6600K) will do very well.

A Core i7-6700K (or newer 7700K) is just as good, but doesn't make a difference over the Core i5s in most games.

I would at minimum try to get an i3 7100 over a pentium but yeah this 2 core (4 thread) CPU greatly outshines the FX-8350 with double the cores/threads because it is just that much more efficient then AMDs platform from 2012.

If you are just gaming then an i7 will do you almost no good, best use of money would be to get an i5 7600k if ou want to overclock.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/guild-wars-2-performance-benchmark,3268-7.html

Not sure why they didn't also test the hexa- & octa-core FX chips at full speeds, but based on the difference in performance for the FX-4300 underclocked vs. full clock speeds, it's safe to say that the FX-8350 would be able to keep pace with the Intel chips in that review.

Before anyone jumps down my throat, remember that the i5-2500K listed in that review is also a 5-year-old CPU, & even in games that just came out in the past year that 5-year-old core i5 chip is keeping up with Skylake & Kaby Lake chips. So "old" <> "unusable".

That being said, the primary reason not to use an FX chip in a brand-new build is because the platform is "dead"...just like Intel's Haswell chips have a "dead" platform. Not because they're not available any more, but because their manufacturers have moved on to newer platforms -- Intel has replaced Haswell's Socket LGA 1150 platform with the Socket LGA 1151 platform used by Skylake & Kaby Lake, while AMD is replacing FX's Socket AM3+ platform with Ryzen's Socket AM4 platform.

If you can wait another month or so, AMD will have its Ryzen CPUs out, & places like Tom's, Techspot & Anandtech can test & benchmark it to see how it stacks up against Intel's Skylake/Kaby Lake systems, as well as having a better idea of how much they'll cost.

The Dual Core pentiums in that link beat the FX 8000 by like 10 FPS , basically 18% better.

The Pentium G4560 and up are dual cores with hyperthreading, making them almost indistinguishable from Core i3 models. You're talking about spending 80% more for 5-10% more performance.



A Kaby Lake Core i3 approximately matches the Core i5-2500K and leaves an FX-8370 in the dust. Even the Pentium G4560 is competitive against the Core i5-2500K, though obviously the Pentium cannot be overclocked.

http://www.legitreviews.com/intel-core-i3-7350k-processor-review_190299/8

http://www.tweaktown.com/news/55917/pentium-g4560-costs-64-fights-core-i5-2500k-270/index.html

First off, while the Sandy Bridge Pentium & the FX-8xxx chip were on the same chart, they were all clocked at the same frequency (3.0GHz). For the majority of Sandy Bridge Pentiums, that ranges anywhere from stock to a slight overclock (G620 rated at 2.6GHz, G870 rated at 3.1GHz), for the FX chips that ranges from a slight overclock down to a major underclock (FX-8100 rated at 2.8GHz base/3.1 to 3.7GHz Turbo, FX-8170 rated at 3.9GHz base/4.2 to 4.5GHz Turbo). And yes, we're talking about the 1st-generation FX chips, because they mention "Bulldozer" modules in the article (not the later Piledriver versions).

Second, the chart before that in the article doesn't include either the Pentium or the FX-8xxx chip, but does show that running the FX-4xxx chips at their full power had an effect on their performance: not only did going from 3.0GHz to 4.0GHz boost its performance by 70%, but by putting it back to stock it came out ahead of the stock Pentium, even if only by ~3% (FX-4100 rated at 3.6GHz base/3.7 to 3.8GHz Turbo, FX-4150 rated at 3.8GHz base/3.9 to 4.0GHz Turbo), & that's on a chip that (because of the modules) is essentially a dual-core with Hyper-Threading equivalent (& probably why it was on par with the core i3 chip). As noted before, the FX-8xxx chips are fairly similar in their frequencies (base clocks tended to be slightly lower, but their Turbo clocks tended to go higher). So, again, when their chips are shown to be more sensitive to frequency adjustments, yet you use the underclocked results to justify their "defeat", it actually tends to disprove the point.

And finally...since those Pentiums not only didn't have Turbo boosts, but also were "locked" so they couldn't be overclocked, you had zero chance of improving the Pentium's performance.

If anything, the main conclusion you can get from the chart is that while HyperThreading has a small impact on performance in Guild Wars 2 (3% improvement for the core i3 dual-core/HT CPU over the Pentium dual-core CPU, 7.5% improvement for the core i7 quad-core/HT CPU over the core i5 quad-core CPU), you see a bigger improvement by increasing the number of physical cores in your CPU (26% improvement for the core i5 over the core i3/30% over the Pentium, 28% improvement for the FX-6xxx over the FX-4xxx, 37% improvement for the FX-8xxx over the FX-4xxx).



Huh, that's weird. Somehow I must have missed where the OP was asking about Thief, GTA V, or Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (the 3 games in the first link), or how an aggregate score (the second link) -- where we don't even know what games were tested for the comparison (and it only lists the FX-6300 specifically) -- is now "proof" about how they'll perform in a particular game.

At least when I say that, at best, the new Kaby Lake Pentium will probably perform no better than the i5-2500K, I can say that's it because a) the actual game performance shows HyperThreading has only a small effect on performance, b) the actual game performance (again) shows that the number of physical cores in Guild Wars 2 has a noticeable effect on performance, & c) since the core i5 saw little performance gain going from 3.0GHz to 4.0GHz, chances are very slim that those Kaby Lake Pentium's clock speeds will have that significant of an effect.

https://www.computerbase.de/2017-01/intel-pentium-g4560-test-kaby-lake/3/

AMD's poor single threaded performance makes it inferior, for MMO gaming. The single threaded performance, is vastly superior to FX. FX was competitive with Sandy bridge, but that was over 4yrs ago.