FX-6300 VS Phenom 965 BE for gaming

Fx 6300 would be great as new games are using more cores now and would perform better than the x4, You wont be able to get all of that for £220, A copy of windows 7 would be £69 alone,
CPU- £90-100
MOBO- £50-£60
RAM- £30
OS- £69
TOTAL-259
There are other ways of getting windows 7 but I'm not prepared to say how.  

tiger has a good deal

^ I disagree with that, there arent really much "games" that use more than 4 cores. The only benefit you would get with more than 4 cores is video editing or some other programs that will utilize it. As for the 2 you've picked out. The FX series imo and a lot of others hasnt really lived up to its expectations and even with the new Vishera FX processors they havent delivered on what people want them to. I had a 965 BE before I upgraded to Intel and I can say that it was really good and played all my games fine. But I also had a high end GPU to pair with is as well. As far as Mobo and RAM. Here are some choices:

Phenom 965 BE:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

RAM:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

^ This is the RAM I have and its amazing.

Mobo:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

^59.99 After 15$ Rebate not sure if that applies to £

Here is a cheaper one

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Also do you have a PSU and GPU picked out as well ?

Oh its an upgrade but thanks, i know its not the best but i do have a touchscreen monitor so i will be getting Windows 8 for £50

http://www.amazon.co.uk/ADMI-AMD-Phenom-3-4Ghz-PRE-ASSE...

That looks like a good deal.

do you think it could max out battlefield 3 or at least let my graphics card reach my full potential

Throw a decent clock on that 965 and that 7770 should be able to come close to maxing BF3 maybe minus maxing AA.

It has the power to run BF3 but not fully maxed out. You would need a upgrade on the GPU in the future for that. But the 7770 is still a good card and I have buddies that game with it and play the game fine on high settings with AA and all that turned down.

did i say i had a 7770? well i have a gtx 560ti so they're about the same

Hmmm I guess you didnt, the person that commented above said something about throwing your 7770 in it, so I thought you told him.

I'd say the FX 6300 mainly because you get more cores and it multi tasks better if you're planning on doing that. The Phenom is still very good, and it will perform slightly better in SOME games than the FX 6300. I'm talking about 3-5 FPS at max. So go with the FX 6300

965 is by far better, the FX are server processors, and if games ARE in fact using more cores(which isn't really true) the 965 still wins by a lot, because the 6300 is 3 Physical cores with 3 integer cores, it's essentially a hyper threaded tri-core. Because each integer/physical pair shares the same L2 and FTPs. It's 6 cores running off the resources of 3.

If you look at benchmarks even the i3-2120 and the 965 BE beat the FX processors even up to 8150 in all but the most heavily threaded of tasks. Plus, the 965 BE is much cheaper, use the saved money for GPU upgrades/future upgrades.

Good luck, btw, 965 OC'd is roughly equivalent to i5 2500k, FX-6300 OC'd is roughly equivalent to BSOD.

id go with fx-6300 coz its newer technology and a little bit better in games than 965.
however if budget is a concern then 965 would be a better bang for the buck cpu.
and 560ti is faster than 7770