BuBzXXL :
My friend is getting a new pc and he is getting the FX-8120, I'm trying to tell him that there are better choices for the price. He won't go over $190.
Normally I wouldn't say anything, but my other friend said, "not everyone is rich and can afford overpriced intel" and I know there has to be a better INTEL cpu for the money... So what I'm asking is that if you can help me find that under $190 Intel CPU that will outperform the FX-8120. (and if you have a FX cpu I don't want to sound like im hating on them sorry)
Thanks
BuBz
I'm going to pretend we didn't have a war going in this thread and answer this dilemma hoping those who aren't interested in offering you sound financial advice but would rather browbeat people who don't agree with them will take a second and potentially learn something about the fundamentals of personal computing.
For gaming. Strictly for gaming. Game programming despite the advances in graphics is still largely coded in the same programming languages that were used to program games 15 years ago. As such, games are almost completely limited by the video card. Thus, when you are faced with a tight budget and forced to pick between a better video card or a better CPU. The logical choice is almost always going to be the video card. Now this does go within reason. Most games only use 2 cores currently. Although there are some that use more. Battlefield 3, Skyrim, Crysis for example. As such, anyone who would seriously consider a Pentium G850 for a gaming rig in 2012, would be idiotic. At bare minimum, the i3-2120 is only a dual core, but it does have HyperThreading, which quite effectively allows the processor to deal with running background programs without bottlenecking game performance. A Pentium G850 has lower clock rates, which in and of itself is a limitation, but no HyperThreading to help out. And it cannot be overclocked. Essentially, a Pentium G850 equates to being half of a i5-2300. As you can see, my Phenom II @ 4.0GHZ outperforms my i5-2300.
Ideally, an i5-2400 is a good choice, it does cost $190 though. The i5-2300 as you can see from the bench I posted is not, it has a low 2.8GHZ clock speed, considering the i5-2400 is only $10 more, it is worth every penny for the higher clock rate. Now I don't want to give you the impression that higher clock speed necessarily means a better processor, it comes down to how efficiently the CPU is designed. Clearly it is saying something that an Intel CPU clocked at 2.8GHZ performs almost as well as an AMD one at 4.0GHZ.
Now, if your friend is faced with a choice between for example, buying an i5-2500K (priced at $220) and a 6870 (priced at $170) video card (or something along those lines), hes going to play games much better if he chops down on the CPU budget to a Phenom II 965 (priced at $110 from newegg currently) or an i3-2120 (priced at $130) in order to allow him to increase his budget on the video card and consider something like a 7850 video card or a GTX 570. The bottom line is, for 95% of games on the market, the video card is the most critical choice to make for a gaming system.
Edited.