Advice on AMD FX8120 stock heatsink and fan

I recently built a system around an FX-8150 with the water cooler.

IMHO it should be OK but I would get something a little better for the times when you may be putting load on the CPU.

l tell you that Intel chips are better but I would rather say different and it depends on what you want to do with the PC.

As far as I'm concerned AMD chips give a better bang for your buck because the Mobos and chips are cheaper.

I would put a bit more money in and use the ASUS Sabertooth 990FX board.

Intel Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz Quad-Core Processor or Intel Core i5-3570K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor would be better

You can buy a cheap aftermarket heat sink http://pcpartpicker.com/mr/ncixus/cooler-master-cpu-coo...

Thanks,

1) Any reason why ASUS 990X would be a better cost/performance option over something like the Asus P8H77-V LE S1155 Intel H77 DDR3 ATX

http://www.dabs.com/products/asus-p8h77-v-le-s1155-inte...

2) Bigcyvo, would you mind expanding on your preference of the Intel i5, I am really interested, I am new to PC builds.

3) Thanks for your suggestion, seems I can get a decent cooler for not too high price.

I really like the features of the Sabertooth (10 thermal sensors on the board) plus it gives the functionality of the 990FX chipset on it.

Both the I5s recommended by Bigcyco are designed for OCing and would give comparable or marginally better performance in most games atm but I still think that the AMD solution is still much better value for money.

marginally ? i would phrase is as "runs rings around".

you'll find that the phenom xx 965 or higher is for 90%+ of all cases faster than the 8120. especially gaming and anything that is not perfectly optimized to use 8 cores (almost everything) due to a higher clock speed AND a higher performance per core at equal clock speed. you have to keep in mind a few things with CPu performance. one 3 ghz cpu is not the other 3 ghz cpu. just like with car engines really, one 2 liter engine doesn't give the same amount of hp as a 2 liter engine from a different company. and as the comparison runs, the new generation AMD cpu's has very bad performance compared to other modern cpu's at the same clock speed. the only thing it is good for is large data bases and perfectly threaded programs. you mentioned stuff that would need to run for considerable amounts of time, it depends how well that thing is threaded to make a optimal sugestion for what would be the better CPU.

also, only a 160 gb hard drive ? you might need to check if it is SATA or IDE because most modern motherboards don't have IDE connectors anymore. And if your work with a large database or anything, you might want to invest in a solid state drive too.

Expensive motherboards with bells and whitles is mostly only something that is worth it's money for people who want to overclock..

if you want that system to play games your gonna be a little disappointed.
forget the ssd get because the system isnt fast enough to warrant a ssd even a low end 1 like the m4 it will just make windows load quick and do nothing of use after. its not big enough to be anything other than a boot drive so you wont really have enough room to install much.
better use the money to buy better overall parts.

Gigabyte Z77-DS3H S1155 Intel Z77 DDR3 ATX
£69.99

Intel Core i5-3550 S1155 3.3GHz 6MB
£156.99

Patriot Memory 8GB (2x4GB) Division2 G2 Series 1600MHz DDR3
£34.99

this option would give better gaming performance yes it costs a little more and you get less ram but it will not choke on single threaded apps like the fx has a tendency to do.
if your set on amd then the above advice of get a phenom 2 is good advice.

Intel is better than AMD despite what some people will tell you, I would not go with an AMD 8-core cpu. AMD used to be nice because it was considered a cheaper alternative to Intel that would still get you pretty decent performance. That's not really the case anymore though, because their newest processors aren't much of an improvement over their last generation of processors. They're best 8-core cpu has to be overclocked and even then it barely keeps up with the Intel i5 2500. If you look here you can see the bench marks FX 8150 gets walked over, trampled, and bulldozed into it's grave compared to the rest of those options. http://www.anandtech.com/show/5626/ivy-bridge-preview-c...