I Have Build/CPU Dilema

[StevenGibson1994]

I am struggling to decide weather I want to go down the AMD route, my PC will be just for pure gaming and am wishing to run latest games at 1080p and at minimum of 60fps. The GPU can be either AMD or Nvidia

I have a Budget of £900 GBP

 

[Mattios]

With that budget, go Intel, probably i5. i7 is only needed if you do editing or anything like that,

 

[StevenGibson1994]

With that budget, go Intel, probably i5. i7 is only needed if you do editing or anything like that,

I dont want to do any editing it will just purely be for gaming and browsing the web and watching the occasional video on XBMC

 

[mdocod]

Real-time workload performance (that's gaming), scales very well with core performance, not core count. Any i5 haswell offers nearly the same execution throughput on 4 cores, as an entire 8 core product from AMD. This consolidation of execution performance gives the i5 a significant edge in gaming performance.

 

[StevenGibson1994]

Real-time workload performance (that's gaming), scales very well with core performance, not core count. Any i5 haswell offers nearly the same execution throughput on 4 cores, as an entire 8 core product from AMD. This consolidation of execution performance gives the i5 a significant edge in gaming performance.

So you recommend Intel

 

[mdocod]

I recommend gathering information and going with what makes you happy. If the novelty of an AMD solution outweighs the technical benefits of an Intel solution for you then it won't matter that the i5 is the superior choice.

 

[StevenGibson1994]

I recommend gathering information and going with what makes you happy. If the novelty of an AMD solution outweighs the technical benefits of an Intel solution for you then it won't matter that the i5 is the superior choice.

what are the benefits of an AMD system?

 

[mdocod]

what are the benefits of an AMD system?

For gaming specifically, AMD platforms have very few areas of advantage. Once the budget comfortably fits an i5 there is nothing from AMD that offers any advantages for gaming performance.

The only remaining area of refuge for an AMD gaming enthusiast who is looking for a glimmer of reason to go AMD is on the very low end spectrum, where well priced APUs offer compelling alternatives to pentiums paired with budget dGPUs, and the 860k+dGPU offers compelling alternatives to using Pentiums/i3's and locked i5s with dGPUs. The AM3+ platform with an FX-6300 used to be that last refuge as an alternative to the locked i3/i5 class of products, ironically, AMD's own 860k has effectively displaced that option.

An specific example of where an AMD solution is competitive would be an 860K on a nice quality A88X board, overclocked to ~4.5ghz, paired with a $250-350 Nvidia GPU. In many DX11 tiles, and for a given implementation cost, the AMD CPU with the more powerful Nvidia GPU will have better performance and better visual quality than an i5-4590 on H97 paired with a ~$150-250 AMD GPU.