Intel or AMD ?

[DMRedhead]

I am having trouble choosing the right cpu because I have found out that my motherboard isnt very good when it comes to the FX-8150 even though it states it AM3+ compatible. So I would like to know whether I should stick with my mother board ( GA-MA770T-UD3) or get an intel board and an intel cpu ? I am very new to all of this so I dont know how straight forward this all is, here are my system specs currently.
Cpu: CPU Type DualCore AMD Athlon II X2 270, 3638 MHz (17 x 214)
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 (2048 MB)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3
Case: Coolermaster Elite 310
Memory: Not sure about this one, I used the scanner off www.crucial.com and came up with this Memory Type: DDR3 PC3-10600, DDR3 PC3-12800, DDR3 PC3-8500, DDR3 PC3-14900, DDR3 PC3-17000, DDR3 (ECC)
Maximum Memory: 16GB
Currently Installed Memory: 8GB
Total Memory Slots: 4
Available Memory Slots: 2
Erm, I think thats it.
So any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Also I am very new to all of this so I have never installed a Cpu or motherboard so some advice, links etc on that would be nice. Also price range is about £300

 

[DMRedhead]

Oh and PSU: Corsair GS700 gaming series

 

[willyroc]

At least an i5 Intel; anything lower and your CPU will bottleneck your system. Your GPU is too strong for your CPU at the moment.

 

[DMRedhead]

Okay , do you recommend or anybody for that matter, change completely and go to intel or stick with amd ?

 

[ctomster]

From what I hear, Intel dominates the higher end of the market. The lower price spectrum tends to be somewhat more even.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-fx-pentium-apu-benchmark,3120-10.html
You might be able to find some insights here.

If you're spending that much money to upgrade I'd say switch to Intel.

 

[DMRedhead]

Okay, and motherboard ? Would I have to change memory etc as well ? Like if people could link some products to like amazon or whatever that would greatly help Like what you would use in this situation, so motherboard, memory,cpu etc

 

[ctomster]

Motherboard
ASRock Fatal1ty P67 Performance
LGA 1155, Intel P67 Express PCH
$100

Processor Intel Core i5-3570K
3.4 GHz (3.8 GHz Max Turbo Boost), Quad-Core, 6 MB Shared L3 Cache
$230
You could probably go higher since your budget would allow you to do so.

RAM you shouldn't need to replace.

Anything else?

 

[DMRedhead]

Ahhh this is hurting my head haha

 

[DMRedhead]

Btw also does the PCIE 2.0 compared to PCIE 3.0 make that much of a difference ? cos my card says it supports PCIE 3.0

 

[zooted]

At the moment, no, as I'm pretty sure they haven't fully saturated the bandwidth of pcie 2. It would be a nice feature to have down the road though.

 

[DMRedhead]

Used this as a guide http://www.techradar.com/news/computing-components/motherboards/best-motherboard-14-reviewed-and-rated-904229

 

[DMRedhead]

So price range for mother board ...about £150 pound is this a good board http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gigabyte-GA-Z77X-UD5H-SKT-1155-Z77X-UD5H-Motherboard/dp/B007KZQFF2/ref=sr_1_1?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1347108265&sr=1-1
????
But if there any other suggestions this would help cheers

 

[jtenorj]

Don't put an i5 3750k with a p67 mobo unless you want to risk your setup not posting
when you first try to boot. You can get a 965BE for your current mobo and bump up the
multiplier to 3.7ghz(matching 980BE) on the stock amd cooler and trade blows with
an i5 2300 quad at 2.8(neither of which will bottleneck current games). With a bios update
(perhaps required before uninstalling your Athlon x2 and before installing 965BE) you may
be able to run the likes of the upcoming fx8350 as well(trades blows with i7k quads).
You can push 965BE over 4ghz with a decent air cooler like a hyper 212.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/135388-amd-cpu-bonanza-trinity-desktop-prices-intels-counter-and-the-piledriver-fx-8350s-performance

http://techreport.com/review/23246/inside-the-second-gaming-performance-with-today-cpus

Pay attention to the last page of the techreport article. Notice how the 980 and i5 760 are
in relation to one another. The i5 760 was the same price at launch as a slower sandy i5 now,
but 965BE can be found for under 100 dollars in the us and can go over 4ghz, performing
better than the stock 980 in the chart. The increased power us from a combo of raised
clock speed and possible voltage bump will be easily handled by your GS700. Hope this helps.

 

[DMRedhead]

Don't put an i5 3750k with a p67 mobo unless you want to risk your setup not posting
when you first try to boot. You can get a 965BE for your current mobo and bump up the
multiplier to 3.7ghz(matching 980BE) on the stock amd cooler and trade blows with
an i5 2300 quad at 2.8(neither of which will bottleneck current games). With a bios update
(perhaps required before uninstalling your Athlon x2 and before installing 965BE) you may
be able to run the likes of the upcoming fx8350 as well(trades blows with i7k quads).
You can push 965BE over 4ghz with a decent air cooler like a hyper 212.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/135388-amd-cpu-bonanza-trinity-desktop-prices-intels-counter-and-the-piledriver-fx-8350s-performance

http://techreport.com/review/23246/inside-the-second-gaming-performance-with-today-cpus

Pay attention to the last page of the techreport article. Notice how the 980 and i5 760 are
in relation to one another. The i5 760 was the same price at launch as a slower sandy i5 now,
but 965BE can be found for under 100 dollars in the us and can go over 4ghz, performing
better than the stock 980 in the chart. The increased power us from a combo of raised
clock speed and possible voltage bump will be easily handled by your GS700. Hope this helps.

So do you think it is safe to put a FX-8150 In my motherboard, its just cos i can get it cheap off a friend, I just wanna know really because if it does work then I can just do that.

 

[DMRedhead]

Wait I see that it would out perform it anyway. How does an older cpu beat an newer 8 core cpu ?

 

[DMRedhead]

Okay well I am going to go with your advice I think and get the 965be and overclock it also will the hyper 212 fit inside my elite 310 case ? also any information on how to update the bios and overclock would also be greatly appreciated

 

[egilbe]

Wait I see that it would out perform it anyway. How does an older cpu beat an newer 8 core cpu ?

No one mentioned an 8150. They were not as good for gaming as the older Deneb core processors. It was a step backwards for AMD.

 

[DMRedhead]

Or any other cooling solutions for my case, not too bothered about the price as long as its not ,like £100

 

[jtenorj]

I think the hyper 212 evo(the only hyper 212 in the UK on pcpartpicker.com) is maybe too
tall for your case. Your Elite 310 is 7.5in wide and the hyper 212 evo is 159mm tall. You
probably need at least 160mm of clearance from the top of the cpu heatspreader to the
inside surface of your side panel. The Zalman CNPS7X LED has 3 direct contact copper
heatpipes and a 92mm fan. It stands 135mm above the cpu socket. It comes with high
quality Zalman brand thermal paste and installs easily on AMD mobos. 25 pounds 43
pence Inc VAT. (visit Zalman's site for detailed video install instructions)

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/zalman-cnps7x-led-v-shaped-dual-heat-sink-cpu-cooler

Scan also has 964BE at a very good price: 71 pounds 95 pence Inc VAT.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/amd-phenom-ii-x4-965-black-edition-s-am3-34ghz-8mb-cache-125w-retail

I guess you have done some overclocking of your cpu via bus manipulation on that mobo
of yours. I read some customer reviews on newegg(US) where people complained about
the chipset heatsink being flimsy. They wondered if it would be good for modifying voltage.
You won't need to mess with bus changes to overclock the 965BE, but your bios does need
to have the option of setting the cpu multiplier higher or lower. It also wouldn't hurt if the
bios allowed for voltage tweaking as well. You may be able to do some undervolting to
start the overclock process.

 

[DMRedhead]

I am very sorry but in the last paragraph I have pretty much no idea what your talking about ha, I have overclocked my cpu but only a little and I did via the bios screen when you first start my pc. I dunno what bus changes are :-/. also do you think the Corsair H60 is better than the zalman ?

 

[jtenorj]

Your system specs showed a cpu with a non standard clockspeed and non standard
base clock. I guess that board can do some auto overclocking for you, but you should
have a bios setting that will allow you to manually adjust the base clock. I don't have
personal experience with either that air or water cooler, but new egg user reviews show
the zalman effectively cooling somewhat more heavily overclocked Phenom II parts .
I personally would not go with the H60. These closed loop coolers aren't that much more
effective than a similarly priced air cooler, and with air you don't have the risk of a system
killing leak. That's just imho.

 

[DMRedhead]

Yeah I had to go into the bios screen and change something to manual. Once I was in there I had to change some number thing, where I could pick a number from 200 to 500. I ended up putting in like 225 or something which makes my cpu overclocked to 3.8 ghz. I also increased the voltage very slightly. I dunno if I have done anything wrong or not :/. Thats what I was gonna do once I get my new cpu. Also thanks on the advice about the coolers appreciate it

 

[jtenorj]

With the Phenom II x4 965BE(black edition), the easiest way to overclock will be to adjust
the multiplier(default is 17 times a base clock of 200) versus adjusting the base clock,
which changes your ram speed and potentially other system timings. Black Editions have
totally unlocked cpu multipliers(you can usually turn any processor's multipler down like the
system does automatically when you are idling on the desktop not doing anything) that let
you to raise the multiplier & make your cpu run faster(most processors are locked against
raising the multiplier). I should think that since the 965BE uses the same amd cooler as
970BE(3.5ghz), 975BE(3.6) and 980BE(3.8) that you should be able to simply turn up the
multiplier from 17 to 18.5(perhaps with a tiny voltage bump) and run your 965BE at 980BE

(inserting wall of text wedge now)

speed and keep temperatures fairly well under control. Actually, you don't plan on using
the amd cooler(it's not great ie loud) but something like the zalman. You only need to up
the voltage when overclocking to improve stability if a lower speed fails(give it more juice
to support the higher clocks). In fact, it is possible that you may be able to turn down
the voltage a bit at stock speeds and still remain stable. A lot of people download a free
program called prime 95 and use it to load up all their cpu cores and torture test them to
make sure a overclock is stable(run for 20min. to start and see if there are errors or
uncomfortably high temps. Get speedfan to monitor). The idea is to overclock a bit, then
test for stability and if all is well(good temps, no errors) then go a little higher. If errors

(another wall of text wedge)

happen give the voltage a nudge and try again. Stop when you either reach an overclock
you can live with, reach 110% of stock volts or an increase of .1 volts(depends on the
processor. Look up some guides on line for both the max safe volts and temps for your
cpu). For your inital oc with 965BE and the zalman cooler, I would bump the multi up to
980BE speed and test to see what temps you get. Then you can go 1/2 multi at a time
(100mhz increase in cpu clock) and retest from there. Also, when you reach a decent
overclock you will want to test it overnight for good temps and no errors. If that's the
case then you have a good stable overclock. If you get errors or the temps are a little
high, back off 100mhz and test again. If good then keep it (the oc).

Sorry this got a little long and run on/wall of texty. I threw in a few breaks to try and
make it a little easier 2 read . I hope this explains a few things and will be helpful to you.

 

[DMRedhead]

Had to read it a few times to understand properly but this helped alot thanks