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How much better is i3 / X4?

Danny862

Danny862

Danny862

Associate
Joined
17 Nov 2010
Posts
336
Location
UK
Hi,
i am now ready to upgrade, with holiday and all the spare time :)

i have around ~£200 but the lower the cost the better.

so my options are:
AMD Phenom X4 (i am considering waiting for BD)
Intel Core i3 2120 (dont want 1156 as upgrade options later on are difficult)
Upgrade my current system and get a SSD to boost proformance

so my questions are
Would the E7500 (overclocked) be able to compete with the X4 / i3 ?
how far can the E7500 overclock (on air)?
which upgrade option is the best in terms of gaming (MW, FBC2 ect), Windows 7 proformance and productivity (office and email ect)?

Current spec in signature

thanks in advance
 
Forget about Phenom II...even the Phenom II X4 980BE at 3.7GHz is slower than the i3 2100 st stock speed in everyday applications and lower frame rate in gaming, plus it consume around TWICE the power of i3 2100 when under load (and hotter as well). If you are upgrading CPU/motherboardRAM, AMD is a poor choice at the moment. Also, not to forget even the performance of Bulldozer is unconfirmed (hell, even the release date is unconfirmed!).
 
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are you sure? the i3 doest proform aswell as the Phenom is mulit threadded apps and games does it? and the i3 isnt overclockable atall or easily anyway, and power doesnt bother me as long as it will work under my 530-580W PSU,

as you can tell i am a bit hesitant about buying another intel... IMO it doesnt seem to be as cost/proformance balanced as the AMD's do

please spec me a system you would happily reccomend ~£200

thank you all :)
 
Danny862 said:
are you sure? the i3 doest proform aswell as the Phenom is mulit threadded apps and games does it? and the i3 isnt overclockable atall or easily anyway, and power doesnt bother me as long as it will work under my 530-580W PSU,

as you can tell i am a bit hesitant about buying another intel... IMO it doesnt seem to be as cost/proformance balanced as the AMD's do

please spec me a system you would happily reccomend ~£200

thank you all :)
Click to expand...

I would still get a Q6600 TBH! It is the more cost effective upgrade for your system. The CPU also 4 times the L2 cache of your E2180 meaning a decent improvement in single core performance.

Also,I have a Core i3 2100 myself and it is a decent CPU. OTH,one of my mates has a 2.9GHZ Phenom II X4 and they can play many games fine too. In multi-threaded applications the Core i3 is slower than the Phenom II X4.

BTW,I would not skimp on the motherboard and many of the cheaper ones under £60 only have two RAM slots so a cheaper PCB can be used. This is fine for a mini-ITX motherboard due to lack of PCB space but not for a mATX or ATX one.

Anyway,Bulldozer is being released soon and I would wait until then for a new system. More competition means better prices.
 
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Danny862 said:
are you sure? the i3 doest proform aswell as the Phenom is mulit threadded apps and games does it? and the i3 isnt overclockable atall or easily anyway, and power doesnt bother me as long as it will work under my 530-580W PSU,
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That's because while while Phenom II X4 might have 4 cores, their cores are much slower. Phenom II X4 980BE...which is at 3.7GHz is only "on par" with i3 2100 in games that's use all 4 cores, should as BFBC2:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/20873/2

...and in ANY games that doesn't use all 4 cores fully, it lag behind the i3 2100 by quite a margin:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2011/07/01/intel-core-i3-2100-review/6

Regarding higher power consumption, what it means is the Phenom II X4 will generate much more waste heat than the i3 2100...and quite frankly I don't think it would be a good idea to use the stock cooler on the Phenom II X4 clocked at 3.6GHz or above, whereas the i3 2100 can get away with using stock cooler due to its lower power consumption and less waste heat being generated.

As for the Q6600, it is worth considering, but personally I wouldn't recommend it. However from my own experience, I find even my Q6600 overclocked to 3.6GHz have some limitation. Even my 5850 would get bottlenecked by my overclocked Q6600. Not so much in games that are well optimised for quad like BFBC2, but in any games that only uses 1-3 cores, my GPU usage will take a dive during intensive scenes and so does the frame rate. To be honest it is quite annoying...this is because clearly my overclocked Q6600 is still quite capable, but my 5850 still get bottlenecked by it...and this due to game developers STILL fail to make every new games they release being well-optimsed for Quad. That's probably something to do with half-assed consoles porting...
 
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Marine-RX179 said:
and quite frankly I don't think it would be a good idea to use the stock cooler on the Phenom II X4 clocked at 3.6GHz or above, whereas the i3 2100 can get away with using stock cooler due to its lower power consumption and less waste heat being generated.
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thanks for the info, but the reason the i3 can use stock is becuse it cant be overclocked :) i already have an aftermarket cooler here and i am planning on (later this year) gettting a watercooling kit such as the H60.

sorry for not just "accepting" anyones answer, i am just trying to get all the infomation i can :D

thank you for all your help everyone

another (off topic) thing is RAM, how much better is 1600MHz DDR3 4GB than my current 4GB DDR2 1066MHz?
 
Marine-RX179 said:
That's because while while Phenom II X4 might have 4 cores, their cores are much slower. Phenom II X4 980BE...which is at 3.7GHz is only "on par" with i3 2100 in games that's use all 4 cores, should as BFBC2:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/20873/2

...and in ANY games that doesn't use all 4 cores fully, it lag behind the i3 2100 by quite a margin:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2011/07/01/intel-core-i3-2100-review/6

Regarding higher power consumption, what it means is the Phenom II X4 will generate much more waste heat than the i3 2100...and quite frankly I don't think it would be a good idea to use the stock cooler on the Phenom II X4 clocked at 3.6GHz or above, whereas the i3 2100 can get away with using stock cooler due to its lower power consumption and less waste heat being generated.

As for the Q6600, it is worth considering, but personally I wouldn't recommend it. However from my own experience, I find even my Q6600 overclocked to 3.6GHz have some limitation. Even my 5850 would get bottlenecked by my overclocked Q6600. Not so much in games that are well optimised for quad like BFBC2, but in any games that only uses 1-3 cores, my GPU usage will take a dive during intensive scenes and so does the frame rate. To be honest it is quite annoying...this is because clearly my overclocked Q6600 is still quite capable, but my 5850 still get bottlenecked by it...and this due to game developers STILL fail to make every new games they release being well-optimsed for Quad. That's probably something to do with half-assed consoles porting...
Click to expand...

The stock cooler on phenom II's is not bad and any new PII X4 should clock well at stock volts meaning little to no excess heat, My 965 C3 with stock volts of 1.42 will go from 3.4 up to 4.0 without a voltage increase (On the stock cooler).

Danny862 said:
another (off topic) thing is RAM, how much better is 1600MHz DDR3 4GB than my current 4GB DDR2 1066MHz?
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Depends on what games you want to play and the timings difference between the kits but even then your increase would be little to none.

Also in terms of performance of a PII X4 and 6950 with unlocked shaders compares very similarly to my friends i7 950 and GTX 580 in games.

Unless you can stretch to a 2500k I would go for the PII
 
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Jayster said:
The stock cooler on phenom II's is not bad and any new PII X4 should clock well at stock volts meaning little to no excess heat, My 965 C3 with stock volts of 1.42 will go from 3.4 up to 4.0 without a voltage increase (On the stock cooler).
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Not every chip is the same...average Phenom II X4 need around 1.45-1.5v vcore to clock to 3.8~4.0GHz stable. Either way it still doesn't change the fact being much higher power comsumption under load (and generate more waste heat), and slower in games that don't use 4 cores fully if comparing to i3 2100.

Jayster said:
Also in terms of performance of a PII X4 and 6950 with unlocked shaders compares very similarly to my friends i7 950 and GTX 580 in games.
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Something must be really wrong with your friend's system if it is only on par with your system, considering both his CPU and graphic card are much faster...unless the comparison was done on a heavily AMD optimised game like Shogun 2, or the graphic settings were not the same.
 
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Marine-RX179 said:
Not every chip is the same...average Phenom II X4 need around 1.45-1.5v vcore to clock to 3.8~4.0GHz stable. Either way it still doesn't change the fact being much higher power comsumption under load (and generate more waste heat), and slower in games that don't use 4 cores fully if comparing to i3 2100.


Something must be really wrong with your friend's system if it is only on par with your system, considering both his CPU and graphic card are much faster...unless the comparison was done on a heavily AMD optimised game like Shogun 2, or the graphic settings were not the same.
Click to expand...

C3 stepping PII X4's clock much better than older stepping's as for your power consumption I ignored it because I would not see it as a point to consider unless building a htpc, server or similar.
The reason the benchmarks posted by you show it lagging behind in games is because the test methodology is not indicative of real world performance.
The comparisons where done on mainly GTA 4, BFBC2, Dirt3 (Yes my system performed better due to AMD optimisation) and Crysis (His setup performed better due to Nvidia optimisation) considering a 6970 is very close to a GTX 580 (Yes it will pull away with extreme tesselation) it just shows how little difference a cpu can make when gaming with a discrete graphics card or how Phenom II's are still very competent chips. There is nothing wrong with my friend set-up and I am sure it would do a lot better in other tasks such as rendering but the difference in games is small.

Within lower budgets AMD simply offer better value for money hence why I said if the budget can be stretched to a 2500k go for it.

Lots of people don't seem to realise just how close AMD are to Intel in many scenarios.
 
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Jayster said:
The reason the benchmarks posted by you show it lagging behind in games is because the test methodology is not indicative of real world performance.
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Not real world? Different CPUs are compared on the same graphic card with the same graphic settings and ran through the same bench under the same condition. Bar chart showing the frame rate aside, they have shown a line-graph showing the ups and downs during the bench for comparing between different CPUs.

Jayster said:
The comparisons where done on mainly GTA 4, BFBC2, Dirt3 (Yes my system performed better due to AMD optimisation) and Crysis (His setup performed better due to Nvidia optimisation) considering a 6970 is very close to a GTX 580 (Yes it will pull away with extreme tesselation) it just shows how little difference a cpu can make when gaming with a discrete graphics card or how Phenom II's are still very competent chips. There is nothing wrong with my friend set-up and I am sure it would do a lot better in other tasks such as rendering but the difference in games is small.

Within lower budgets AMD simply offer better value for money hence why I said if the budget can be stretched to a 2500k go for it.

Lots of people don't seem to realise just how close AMD are to Intel in many scenarios.
Click to expand...
I think you probably just failed to perceive the difference in smoothness, or you guys are comparing at low res, or running with different res and graphic settings (AA, AF etc), or his i7 950 is not overclocked, which might lead to bottlenecking his GTX580 in games that don't use all 4 cores. 6970 being as fast as GTX580 is simply impossible, except for in Shogun 2, or may be Dragon Age II which GTX580 is having driver issue and not performing fully with low GPU usage. In game like BFBC2 the GTX580 should be huge margin ahead of the 6970.

And the power consumption (and heat) difference between the i3 2100 and overclocked Phenom II X4 is a very valid arguement- why should anyone get a CPU that's consumption twice the power and generate more heat under load, when another CPU can produce simliar/better performance at half the power consumption? I can't think of any reason, unless someone like their room warmer, or like to donate more money to the energy company.

And in case you don't realise...build cost of a i3 2100 system is around same price level as building a AMD based on AM3 board + Phenom II 955BE...and if need to add a 3rd party cooler for AMD's build, it actually becomes more expensive.
 
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marms said:
Forward 2 pages on that review to the overclocking section...
http://techreport.com/articles.x/20873/4
Overclocked the Phenom II X4 980BE destroys the i3 2100 in EVERY benchmark!!!
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Totally irrelevent, as gamers in general wouldn't give a donkey about performance on things like video enoding, 7-zip compression, Cinebench as they are just meaningless numbers to them since they don't use them. What's relevent is gaming (frame rate) and everyday application performance.
 
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Marine-RX179 said:
Totally irrelevent, as gamers in general wouldn't give a donkey about performance on things like video enoding, 7-zip compression, Cinebench as they are just meaningless numbers to them since they don't use them. What's relevent is gaming (frame rate) and everyday application performance.
Click to expand...

The OP also asked about Windows 7 proformance and productivity and if the two processors were almost equal in gaming at stock the Phenom will then pull ahead when overclocked.
 
i am currently gettting around 45 FPS on High settings in BF BC2 (according to FRAPS)

which will come with the biggest increase, i am kind of going against the i3, in favour of either a Q6700 / E7500 (OC) and an SSD to boost overall proformance, second is the AMD, the CPU i am running now i do not find slow in any sense of the word. it is just out of date and games are getting more demanding so time to upgrade :)

the more fps the better :D
 
marms said:
The OP also asked about Windows 7 proformance and productivity and if the two processors were almost equal in gaming at stock the Phenom will then pull ahead when overclocked.
Click to expand...


Very ture....

anyone against this

AMD Phenom X4 955BE @3.8GHz
Artic Cooling Freezer Pro 7
4GB DDR3 1600
ASUS Motherboard (FullATX)

thanks agian :D
 
You say in the opening post you don't want the 1156 as upgrade options are difficult. Well by going with the Q6700 route, you're buying into a dead socket aswell.

You essentially answered your own question in the opening post.

You want to go with an AM3 board and a Phenom within your current budget, This leaves room to upgrade the CPU later to anything on the AM3 socket(Thats a lot of great processors/potential)

Personally I prefer Sandybridge. But from a few posts in here, you seem set on going AMD
 
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