gameill

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Have been seeing a lot of budget builds. Seems like i might be the only dude in the world who went with Phenom 2 x4 965BE. What gives? I read about the bad gaming performance of Zambezi, and generally amazing reviews of the Phenom.

IM not a fanboy of either chipset manufacturer, just that Phenom seems unreal at 120. That, and this is my first time not getting ripped off at best buy. Any insight is appreciated, as i am buying my internals in a few days. (Yay d3)
 
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Phenom II isn't bad the i3 depending on what games benched will slightly win/slightly lose/draw level however if you leave gaming and look at other tasks the Phenom X4 thrashes the i3 largely. Ivybridge compatibility is a stupid reason to state.... the CPU has nothing to do with that that would depend on you pairing the (budget) i3 with a expensive board (z77) and only then be relevent if you plan to go and replace the i3 in the next year as after that socket 1155 and Ivybridge will both be old news as Haswell and a new socket replaces them.

Its a good budget buy still and it outperforms the budget FX chips. FX is junk hence the fact its constantly on great cheap offers and thats why people buy it.

Your correct that you can OC to 980...

gameill

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That's a really cool tool there. Thanks for that.

I had some advice that i could oc to a 980be specs on stock cooler.... that compares much better to the i3, but IM still not even sure what the numbers on those benchmarks mean. That and a lot are miniscule differences (numbers close).

Why is amd so bad?
 

wr6133

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Phenom II isn't bad the i3 depending on what games benched will slightly win/slightly lose/draw level however if you leave gaming and look at other tasks the Phenom X4 thrashes the i3 largely. Ivybridge compatibility is a stupid reason to state.... the CPU has nothing to do with that that would depend on you pairing the (budget) i3 with a expensive board (z77) and only then be relevent if you plan to go and replace the i3 in the next year as after that socket 1155 and Ivybridge will both be old news as Haswell and a new socket replaces them.

Its a good budget buy still and it outperforms the budget FX chips. FX is junk hence the fact its constantly on great cheap offers and thats why people buy it.

Your correct that you can OC to 980 levels on the stock cooler however with addition of an aftermarket you can normally hit 4GHZ easily. If you havn't bought a motherboard yet if your budget allows try to get a 970 or 990 chipset with an AM3+ socket this should then allow upgrades on future AM3+ CPU's (piledriver, steamroller)
 
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samuelspark

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Once you have the money for an i5, even a 2300, it will beat any AMD CPU.
 

samuelspark

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Benchmarks are like tests and the benchmark scores are like test scores. Time should always be lower, points higher, and fps higher if you're looking for a good cpu. AMD is bad because they are behind (about 1.5 generations, I believe). Micro architecture makes a huge difference. It's like building a tower. If both companies were to have towers to represent their micro architecture, AMD's would look like a simple stacked tower compared to Intel's complex design of triangles and different geometric shapes (I'm exaggerating, AMD isn't that bad, but you get my point)
 

wr6133

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Your arguement is not relevent to this thread. Its childish and pointless.

If I had the cash for a Supercomputer it would beat any i5

Thats as relevent as the i5 statement and more factual than most of what you say in this thread.

AMD is bad because they are behind

At the high end yes. At the budget end no thats wrong. The OP's Phenom II will trade blows roughly with the similar price i3 outside of gaming it's 4 cores will trounce the i3 in many uses.
 

samuelspark

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So this person is never going to upgrade his computer? Once he gets that first upgrade, it instantly becomes Intel > AMD.

Gaming Performance, i3 vs Phenom II

http://www.techspot.com/review/467-skyrim-performance/page7.html

http://www.techspot.com/review/305-starcraft2-performance/page13.html (old i3 beats phenom II)

The Anandtech benchmarks I posted

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-fx-pentium-apu-benchmark,3120-10.html

Where's your proof?
 

gameill

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Thatnks wr6133! Great insight!

Samuel i understand the lower/higher is better. What IM saying is for example 2-3 fps isn't gonna make or break anyone. Just like 2-3 seconds. Miniscule differences. What i don't get a lot of is the categories of benchmarks.

IM also the Guy who doesn't mind being a couple generations behind, its cheaper! (Don't own a tablet for instance)
 
Its hard to take this seriously, what with the "480 best price to performance" as a handle. Budget by implication is lowest cost for best performance, in that event a A8 APU on IGPU performance comprehensively hands even the highest end Intel HD chip a royal hiding to nothing, then you factor in asymetrical crossfire and its a no contest. My point is that Intel don't make budget orientated chips, they market consumer orientated chips for specified consumers.
 

frozentundra123456

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You statement is blatently incorrect. I dont have the link available, but even the 80.00 or so sandy bridge pentium is quite good for gaming, and generally beats the FX-4100. If you look at the best gaming cpus for the money in April 2012, there is an intel cpu in every price category. In fact, there is only one AMD cpu listed, and that is the FX-4100 which gets only an honorable mention.
 


You didn't just take the regular article as the holy grail of what is what did you?

And the quote you are refering to is IGP performance, this is not something new, a barely $130 llano beats a 3770K with HD 4000 by a healthy margin in all GPU orientated peformance benches, the later being a near $400 chip and by a hefty margin. Factor in the capability of pairing that with a 6670 which is cheap, running asymetrical crossfire will run a game like BF3 on med-highish settings at 1900x1080 resolutions, something Intel cannot match at the same budget.
 
Hard to find anything better than the 480 at $210...

Are you talking about when it came out or now, because it wasn't $210 when it was released. And compared to aptly priced contemporary cards the old Fermi is hardly efficient at all. These cards are known to hit 105 degrees at load. I know as I had the volt modded editions.
 

wr6133

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Your benches show the phenom and i3 winning 2 gaming benchmarks each so hardly beating the phenom you provide me my proof. Outside of gaming in a world that is rapidly using multi-core CPU's the Phenom is better.

The 965 can be overclocked the i3 can't. A better comparison is the Phenom 980 as the 965 can be clocked to that speed on stock cooler. With an aftermarket it can make 4GHZ.

Your upgrade arguement is utterly invalid. Who buys a budget CPU for less than a year before they replace it with an EXPENSIVE one? After a year its irrelevent too as haswell will replace ivybridge so the 1155 socket will dead. If you really want to argue upgrades well AM3+ will be valid till 2014. Oh and again your claim the i3 is "ivybridge compatible" explain this statement? How do i magically make an i3 sandybridge in to an ivybridge??? or did you mean the motherboard is? thats a pontless arguement to a guy on a budget too "hey buy a budget CPU with a expensive mobo and then buy a expensive CPU in under 12 months to replace the i3".

At no point do I claim the PII is better than the i5 but as a budget choice its at least equal and argueably better than the i3 and as the OP already has it and was asking if its better than FX yes it is by a fair margin. Sure in a perfect world the i5 would cost $10 with a 9.99 rebate and we would all have one but its not a perfect world some people have to WORK HARD for their money and then carefully spend it.
 

wr6133

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Hard to find anything better than the 480 at $210...

We have argued over this one but i do agree that for anyone looking at a 560ti or a 570 (costing alot more than $210) should take a good look at that 480 at that price. It may have issues but at a cheaper price than many 560ti's it's hard to ignore.
 

samuelspark

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It was against a Phenom II 980... Also, in dual core optimized games, i3 seriously beats phenom by 10-20 fps.
 
Sapphires Toxic OC edition 7950 still has the price to performance crown, that is from Toms, Anandtech, Jonnyguru, Bit Tech, Legitreview, Vortex, PC Format etc etc, it is cooler, faster, overclocks very close to the similar 7970 oc peformance and costs under $400. A GTX480 is hot and inefficient, it is cheap now because it is old, it was a $450 card on release, even in SLI it would be out gunned by SLI'd 570's even 560Ti 448's, it will sit somewhere in between a 7950 and 7970/680 SLI'd but will draw excessive power and run hot.
 
Depends on what is meant by minor, minor to me is 5%-10% that will land it in GTX 570/6970 levels, but will run much hotter and use more power, to reach GTX 580 levels will need at least 20%, if you do that you may need a fire extinguisher, ran them SLI'd, seen people make eggs on them, seen a Fermi fire. That card was hoplessly irrelevent compared with the efficient HD5000 series it competed against.