Fx and the fx pd diffence



Best guess is about 10% higher performance clock for clock and 10-15% overall based on the mobile Piledriver benchmarks. If you have a Bulldozer FX, stick with it and instead upgrade your software as you will get MUCH more bang for your buck with that than in upgrading to Piledriver and running the same highly unoptimized 2000s-era software.
 
Not unless the actual performance is going to be more than a mere 10%. Your Phenom II should still provide you with enough performance for now.

The best way to improve performance is to actually skip a CPU architecture generation. My Q9450 still provides me with good enough performance that I will not upgrade until Haswell comes out next year. By that time it will be 5 years old.

PileDriver is likely what the FX should have been. So if you want to stick with AMD, then you should wait for their next AM3+ CPU. But I'm not sure if there will be one after PileDriver.

I would like AMD to simply kill off socket AM3+. They simply do not have the money to do research and development in CPU for socket AM3+, FM2 and G34 (Opterons). Don't forget the desktop and mobile Radeons as well. Socket FM2 can fill in space left by socket AM3+ and AMD will have more money to spread around for research and development of their remaining products. AMD also needs money to diversify into other technologies as well. They cannot afford to simply remain in the desktop / laptop market if they still want to remain in business 10 or 20 years from now.
 


An FX-4320 should be a decent gaming chip since its Bulldozer-based relative, the FX-4170, is one of the fastest AMD chips for gaming. Take a look at the "Best CPUs for the Money" articles that Tom's puts out. There is a table at the end of those articles showing *roughly* the relative performance of various CPUs for gaming. The FX-4170 is at the top of the AMD list.

Note that the Tom's CPU performance list essentially assumes your CPU is limiting your performance. That is rarely true because graphics performance is usually the limiting factor in performance. The only situations the CPU would occur in are as follows

1. You are running an older, slower CPU in the bottom half to third of that list. The CPUs in that part of the list are the 5-6 year old Athlon 64s, the slower original 5-6 year old Core 2 Duos, crippled Core 2 based Pentium Dual Cores, and Celerons, as well as the low-clocked original 2007 65 nm Phenoms. Few people still use those; they would have upgraded to a faster quad core like a Phenom II X4 or Core 2 Quad which are in the top part of the list.

2. You are running a massive multi-GPU setup on a massive multi-monitor arrangement. Your CPU will be more stressed in that situation than in a typical single-GPU arrangement because the CPU needs to keep the GPUs in sync and shuttle data around the motherboard buses. However you need to have a HUGE multi-monitor setup before you start to have a reasonably fast CPU start to actually affect gameplay (framerate drops below around 30.) Your typical single GPU driving a 1920x1080 monitor will be strongly GPU-limited with a decent CPU like your Phenom II.

3. You are running your game at a very low resolution like 1024x768 and at low quality. The CPU is loaded in this situation as the GPU is doing very little due to the low resolution and quality. The game engines are coded for the CPU to throw frames at the GPU as fast as the GPU will handle them. This is actually how most sites will try to differentiate CPU performance in games. However in my opinion you are not truly "CPU-limited" in this case as you are putting out an enormously high framerate. Saying that a CPU is a "bottleneck" when you are putting out 150 fps (because another CPU can put out 200 fps) sounds more than a little dumb. Crank up the resolution to something sane like 1920x1080 and the GPU now has to work and the between-CPU differences shrink to become insignificant in most cases.



The best way to improve performance in gaming is typically to upgrade your graphics card. The best way to upgrade performance in general usage is to upgrade to an SSD and dump more RAM in the system. Adding a huge monitor or monitors helps too, it makes the computer much more pleasurable to use. If you are doing something (not gaming) that really does hammer the CPU you are just about always better off in upgrading to a workstation/server setup with multiple CPUs as most everything very CPU-intensive today is also multithreaded.

PileDriver is likely what the FX should have been. So if you want to stick with AMD, then you should wait for their next AM3+ CPU. But I'm not sure if there will be one after PileDriver.

Rumors strongly suggest that AM3+ dies with Piledriver. Steamroller comes after Piledriver and in the server arena we know that Steamroller will require new sockets, due to at the very least the addition of an on-die PCIe controller. This will also require different chipsets as well. The high-performance desktop parts share dies with server parts. The current server sockets (C32, G34) are very similar to Socket AM3+ with nearly identical chipsets as well. It would make sense that if they have to be replaced in servers, they would need to be replaced in the very similar desktop platforms as well.

I would like AMD to simply kill off socket AM3+. They simply do not have the money to do research and development in CPU for socket AM3+, FM2 and G34 (Opterons). Don't forget the desktop and mobile Radeons as well. Socket FM2 can fill in space left by socket AM3+ and AMD will have more money to spread around for research and development of their remaining products. AMD also needs money to diversify into other technologies as well. They cannot afford to simply remain in the desktop / laptop market if they still want to remain in business 10 or 20 years from now.

AMD makes even more sockets than that. They also make Socket S1g4 for mainstream mobile chips and Socket C32 for single and dual-CPU servers. They also make two BGA platforms as well- FT1 for the Bobcat CPUs and ASB2 for LV/ULV notebook and embedded.

There doesn't appear to be a lot of money sunk in sockets as AMD has been basically reusing the same ones for a long time. The whole AM* line shares a similar pinout and the AM* line started all the way back in 2006 with AM2. Socket C32 is 2006's Socket F with a slightly different pinout and keying to prevent the insertion of non-compatible Socket F CPUs. Socket S1 has been around since that time period as well, with small pinout changes. The only truly new sockets are G34 and FM1. Coming up, FM2 will apparently be nearly identical to FM1. S1 will be replaced with FS1, which will be a new socket. Server sockets are a big unknown.

AMD also keeps the same cooling solutions for a long long time too- heatsinks are compatible between Sockets 754, 940, 939, AM2/AM2+, AM3/AM3+, FM1, and FM2. You can also fit these heatsinks on most Socket F and all Socket C32 units as well provided you steal the clamp-on bracket from a 754/939 board. The only sockets that don't use the standard 3.5" clamp on heatsink are the mobile sockets and a few early Socket F and all G34 units- they use a 4.1" bolt-through unit. This doesn't cost AMD anything as AMD stopped bundling heatsinks with server CPUs starting with Socket F days and notebook makers all make their own cooling solutions.

I think AMD is plenty diversified. They are in the desktop/laptop/server processor market, embedded processor market, graphics, server technology (SeaMicro), and also are somewhat involved with RAM as well. That's a pretty wide swath of the market.
 


I was referring to only the non mobile CPUs since AMD's biggest consumer market are laptops / sleekbooks. Killing off socket AM3+ means AMD will not be cannibalizing sales between socket AM3+ and socket FM2. It will also eliminate overhead expenses and production costs as well. Meaning shutting down the production lines can actually save AMD a good deal of money, therefore they reduce the amount of money they are paying out to GlobalFoundaries. Unfortunately, that also means they will need to downsize some people as well which is another way to save money. It should also slightly reduce distribution costs as well since there are fewer products. The flip side is that AMD will likely increase the number of socket FM2 APUs which can actually lower costs as a result of economies of scale.




A bit too narrow since they are still bumping up against Intel in most of those markets. I would like to see them do something a little different though I do admit I am not sure which tech segment to should go into at this point in time. Perhaps cloud hosting, but Rackspace is the 800lbs gorilla in that segment.
 

proffet

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Aug 30, 2012
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what's your budget in total.?

to be honest your current motherboard isn't that good and overclocking on it to a high clock is not recommended.
I'm surprised it hasn't went pop already considering you have a good clock in it now..
your options on what to do either AMD or Intel is limited by your budget for one.
Intel for Intel hardware (mobo and CPU) and AMD is either CPU and no overclocking (significant) or full CPU and mobo..
 

proffet

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Aug 30, 2012
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not that Phenom II he has... (no offense)
if he had a C3 Deneb (9xx) instead of the (8xx) Phenom II then maybe.

but as of right now too many performance upgrade options just to stay like he is...