Shall I get Bulldozer or Ivybridge?

[CrabSurfer]

Been reading up on what to get for my gaming system I'm making.

Bulldozer has 8 cores, and is only £145.

Ivybridge only has 4 cores but is £255!

The Bulldozer is 3.60Ghz but the Ivybridge is only 3.50Ghz. Also the Bulldozer has 16mb of cache and the Ivybridge only has 8mb.

The Bulldozer motherboards also seem cheaper for the high end models. And Bulldozer also has the world record for the fastest CPU and is best for over clocking.

But I still see lots of people with Ivybridge CPU's.... why is this?

 

[jamesfreddie]

Bulldozer don't have a record for fastest CPU. But mabe fastest clockspeed.

How about watching the bulldozer reviews?

 

[233]

speed isnt everything when it comes to cpus

the ghz only tells you the number of clock cycles per second that the chip does, think of it as similar to RPM in a car engine

whats more important is the amount of work that the chip can do per clock cycle

basically long story short the Bulldozer chips are quite pants for a home pc tbh, your far better off getting a IB or if you want to save a few quid get a decent sandybridge setup

 

[CrabSurfer]

But with double the cores and double the cache, plus nearly half the price surely the Bulldozer is allot better bang for buck

 

[On Holiday]

AMD haven't been able to compete with Intel for quite a while now.

 

[Jokester]

But with double the cores and double the cache, plus nearly half the price surely the Bulldozer is allot better bang for buck

If you're worried about bang for buck, you're better getting a low end SB chip.

 

[djabs786]

But with double the cores and double the cache, plus nearly half the price surely the Bulldozer is allot better bang for buck

Their are 4 modules in a "8-core" bulldozer, AMD classify each module of having "2 cores." Intel cores perform much better than AMD cores.

 

[233]

But with double the cores and double the cache, plus nearly half the price surely the Bulldozer is allot better bang for buck

still no where near the performance of a decent Ivybridge i'm afraid

some benches here
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/552?vs=434


more on par with a 2500k tbh
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/288?vs=434

 

[CrabSurfer]

I still want to get Bulldozer.

You get a free game and motherboards cost less, and the processor costs even less than the 2500k too

 

[233]

well the answer is to buy a bulldozer then


strange but if you really want one then get one.


personally if it was my money i'd be aiming for a 2500k and a gigabyte z68ap-d3 combo for around £250-260 bung in 40 quid for 8 gig of ram and you have a cracking setup that will notch 4.8ghz with the right cooler

 

[Kitarist]

I would go with ivy all the way.

 

[Pc.robb]

Intel's single core performance is a lot better than bulldozers core performance.

 

[mmj_uk]

I still want to get Bulldozer.

You get a free game and motherboards cost less, and the processor costs even less than the 2500k too

Get one then, just don't expect breathtaking performance... Bulldozer doesn't have enough bang to be good bang for buck.

2500K/3570K are where the real bang for buck is, both of those chips compete well with the £250 chips and will demolish an 8 core Bulldozer in the majority of applications.

 

[Shashman]

in the majority of gaming applications.

Fixed it for you

The OP might be more interested in other non-gaming applications, at which the Bulldozer is best.

 

[CrabSurfer]

Looked at some tests and the i5 is more than the Bulldozer but is not as good, and motherboards cost more, and you get a free game with the Bulldozer. That even without double the cores and mb of cache

 

[Martini1991]

Obviously a troll OP.
Sad that AMD needs troll posters to make it look like people genuinely consider their CPU's over Intels.

 

[reflux]

Obviously a troll OP.
Sad that AMD needs troll posters to make it look like people genuinely consider their CPU's over Intels.

+1

I just don't see the point.

 

[CrabSurfer]

What make are troll CPU's?

 

[Shashman]

Obviously a troll?

Do you know me?

The last AMD processor I owned was a Duron 800. Since then I've had an Intel E6850, Intel E8600 and now run an Intel i5 2550K.

I'm giving the OP another point of view, and seeing as he hasn't mentioned what he'll be mainly using the system he's after for, it was a valid point. The few applications that Bulldozers have been shown to perform better in are non-gaming ones.

Flamefail.

 

[Orcvader]

If the main use is gaming, than the i5 will perform better. Why?

1) Sandy/IvyBridge performs better on the same clock speed compared to Bulldozer. This is because of the higher IPC (Instructions Per Clock). Infact, on the same clock speed, each Bulldozer core performs worse than a Phenom II core, which in turn sits between the original i7s/Core 2s, while Sandy/Ivy performs better than the previous i7s.
2) More cache is good, but it won't make any difference in real life scenarios. It's only useful when all the cores are effectively being used, and only programs such as video encoding can take advantage of this.
3) Games will not use all 8 cores. Games are usually console ports, and commonly only use 2 cores. At most 4 cores, but even then the usage on each core is unbalanced, and most of the load is on two cores.

So even though Bulldozer is faster and has more cache, due to it's architecture, it pulls it down, causing it to perform worse in gaming than Sandy/Ivy, original i7s, Core 2, and Phenom II.

Here's a hierarchy chart to give you an idea on gaming performance between each CPU. You can even see the FX-4170 performs better than the FX-8150 because of it's higher clock speed, even though it only has half the cores, due to most games being only able to use 2 cores: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,review-32447-5.html

The only real reason to get Bulldozer over Sandy/IvyBridge, is only if you do a lot of video encoding.