With computer parts I always look to the future when buying anything. So at first I bought one 670 (this is recently as an example) and then I bought another just to cover me. Oddly enough it came into its own with titles like Crysis 3.
An overclocked Sandy i5 and overclocked FX-8 on the same clock with all cores used are roughly on par with one another; however, we can count games that use up to 8 cores/threads with just the fingers on our two hands (one hand if we were looking at just games on Steam).
Not correct. An overclocked quad core Haswell clock for clock is about dead even with the 8320. 8320 sits between the 3570k and 3770k. We (Martini, I an some others) demonstrated this a couple of days back using a benchmark that supported every CPU. It's also easily demonstrated with a game like Crysis 3, Far Cry 3, BF3 and even BFBC2.
And then there's price. Around £200 for a 8320 and half decent board. That was a major part of the reason I went 8320. Well, that and simple forward thinking really. We've been at the mercy of consoles since (IMO partly) games like NFS : Underground. After that the 360 and PS3 took over gaming completely. The PS2 was miles behind the PC and the 360 somewhat caught up but yes, since then it's been console first PC later.
Two consoles are about to launch, both use AMD CPUs with 8 cores and a specific instruction set. The same one that would be used on a FX CPU. It didn't really take rocket science on my part to realise what would be the safer bet. It was also much cheaper.
I've got a lot of games. I've played through most of the heavy titles recently and had no issues at all with any of them.
Intel's CPU is far from perfect, and I have cursed them many times for the stupid focus on reducing power consumption, intergrated graphic when they should be focusing on increasing IPC in bigger margin than the incremental improvement over the pass two gens- 20% increase bringing the frame rate from 30fps to 36fps in Guild Wars 2 certainly ain't gonna tempt me open up my wallet to upgrade. Hating as their approach as I may, it still doesn't change the fact they are offering the best gaming performance available, and certainly more bang for bucks than AMD's offering because the i5's performance for example doesn't suffer until the games using less than 4 cores (whereas FX8's performance would suffer right away as soon as it uses less than 8 cores). However, this has nothing to do with the fact on the separate case that the FX6300 IS offer better bang for bucks than the "cannot be overlocked i3".
It's not a stupid focus, they're just going in a different direction. They know they have to tbh. They'll be concentrating on lowering power use and die size for tablets, heck, even phones at the rate they're going. AMD have won the console war with its competitors and has been putting serious amounts of cash into Gaming Evolved. This is now going to pay off for them, as their hardware is about to see a seven year reign of support.
I get what you're saying about GW2 but I don't play it. Therefore it's just a random game to me and not a good reason to avoid buying a CPU that is cheaper and offers more bang for the buck as you put it than any other CPU in existence.
Take a look at this. This isn't just fanboy white noise, this is what helped make me decide on what CPU to upgrade to back in May, after spending six years on Intel.
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+FX-8320+Eight-Core
Then take a look at where it stands from a financial standpoint.
And some recent games,most of which don't support 8 cores.
I could go on and on with that. In Crysis 3 and Far Cry 3 the 8 cores are out ahead by quite a margin. Knowing that and having a set amount of money what would you have chosen?
It's a no brainer now dude.Nothing Intel make all the way up to the 4770k is worth touching.
We can keep crying about Windows issue, game engines not using 8 threads/cores all day long, but that's not gonna change anything. FX8 is by no mean a poor CPU if we were to look purely at it as a piece hardware, the problem with is it is just unfortunate that it is a poor match with vast majority game titles due to almost none of them ain't written to support and use up to 8 thread/cores...and in games that does, it still only mean they are closer to competing with the i5. FX-8 is more likely to be "performance as it should" for future games with the release of new consoles, but it still won't do much for current games and older games.
Most games I (and most people) play still uses 4 cores or less, so it's just simply the case picking the hardware that's best suited for the job.
My research begs to differ with the poor match etc. Windows 8 has
massively improved the FX range simply by working properly and as it should.
As I hinted at above I have a massive amount of games. And I mean, massive amount. I've been on AMD since May (mostly after reading the article from Eurogamer) and I can tell you first hand I've had none of the issues you or Martini speak of. And that includes a playthrough of Metro Last Light maxed with 8xMSAA.
) with an AMD GPU which has GCN then surely even if only a handful of games coming within the next 18 months may mean it's not such a bad decision?
