AMD upgrade or not?

avit13

avit13

avit13

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Joined
28 Oct 2013
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4
Hi,

I'm looking for some advice please, my current setup is as follows:

Phenom II 945 (OC to 3.2Ghz)
N560GTX-448 cores Twin Frozr III Power Edition
ASUS M4A89GTD-PRO motherboard
8 Gig DDR3 (not sure of speed)

The PC is used for gaming and i'm looking to upgrade (i'm thinking this could be the last upgrade for a while as I have a baby on the way :). Anyway, my current set up works well for the games i'm playing now at 1920x1080 and i'm not looking to increase the resolution i play at. I'm looking at a budget of about 450 + whatever I could sell my current video card/mobo/cpu for (any ideas what the video card would be worth?).

My question is, what is the best option I have to increase performance in games of the future i.e. the next gen games that are on their way. Initially I was thinking a new video card such as a 770 but would my processor bottleneck it?, and if so by how much?

If my current CPU/mobo will not do justice to the latest video cards, what are my options regarding getting a new cpu/mobo and gfx card? would it really be worth upgrading my current components if i have to get all three and stay within budget?

Any suggestions welcome please - I want to be sure i make the right choice as it could be a while before I upgrade again!

thanks for reading
 
This would be a complete upgrade, good for next gen games:

YOUR BASKET
1 x MSI Radeon R9 280X Gaming Edition OC 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £249.95
1 x AMD Piledriver FX-8 Eight Core 8320 Black Edition 3.50GHz (Socket AM3+) Processor - Retail £119.99
1 x Asus M5A97 EVO R2.0 AMD 970 (Socket AM3+) DDR3 Motherboard £79.99
Total : £449.93 (includes shipping : FREE).



The 280X is more future proof than the 770 with its extra memory and Mantle support.

You'd want to overclock the CPU, so a decent £30 cooler if you don't have one already. If you wanted to spend a bit more, the R9 290 is out in a couple of days, and should be around £300-£350, and will be the latest card.
 
I've just been looking for bits and came up with this - it's over my original budget of 400 but i guess i should be able to get 100 for my old parts?

Would spending a little extra on an i5 be worth it? I do like the idea of going for an intel

Product Name Qty Price Line Total
Sapphire Radeon R9 280X Dual-X OC 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Card Sapphire Radeon R9 280X Dual-X OC 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Card £239.99
(£199.99) £239.99
(£199.99)
Intel Core i5-3570 3.40GHz (Ivybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor (77W) - Retail Intel Core i5-3570 3.40GHz (Ivybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor (77W) - Retail £167.99
(£139.99) £167.99
(£139.99)
Gigabyte Z77-DS3H Intel Z77 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard Gigabyte Z77-DS3H Intel Z77 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard £79.99
(£66.66) £79.99
(£66.66)
Submit Sub Total : £406.64
Shipping cost assumes delivery to UK Mainland with:
DPD Next Day Parcel (Mon-Fri)
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £9.50
VAT is being charged at 20.00% VAT : £83.23
Total : £499.37
 
The fx8320 (at a decent clock) would stomp the non-k i5 for a lot less money.

I went 955be to i5-2500k and the change was enormous, the fx is noticeably faster again in modern games, but in poorly threaded games the i5 was excellent
 
Burnt, you're the only person I've ever seen say the FX is a noticeable gain over the 2500K in gaming with heavy threaded games, every review puts them at margin of error (The only results to the contrary are the beta BF4 results, and well, those results are all over the place, since it's a beta)

I do agree with an overclocked FX8320 over a stock i5 3570, but it wouldn't stomp all over it in gaming.
 
I'd take a 3570K with Z77 board (There's a ton of boards Intel and AMD on the OCUK Clearance section) over an FX83 set up if you can afford it with the R280X, otherwise get the FX83.
 
You're going off topic. The point is aa nonk i5 is not worth having, that is not the same as an i5 is not worth having. Furthermore, at 450 getting an i5k+good mobo doesn't leave much for a future proof GPU. GPU comes first...
 
It's not off topic if you've mentioned something which flies in the face of every other result, as you're giving advice while saying this.

Either way, I do agree, I wouldn't get a none K i5 over an FX83, but I'd get the i5 3570K and cheap Z77 board (Which are in the B-Grade section, for both Intel and AMD) if I could get the R280X (I don't agree with compromise)
But GPU's are rarely future proof, it's generally the CPU that lasts longer.

If I could only get an R280X with an FX83 I would.
 
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Martini1991 said:
Burnt, you're the only person I've ever seen say the FX is a noticeable gain over the 2500K in gaming with heavy threaded games
Click to expand...

BurntProc said:
The fx8320 (at a decent clock) would stomp the non-k i5 for a lot less money.

I went 955be to i5-2500k and the change was enormous, the fx is noticeably faster again in modern games, but in poorly threaded games the i5 was excellent
Click to expand...

If your going to pick at him Martin then let's not twist it. He doesn't mention heavy threaded games but focuses on 'poorly threaded' i.e. not written to utilise 8 cores, there's a difference. He also mentions less money which is another factor in the argument (£/performance).

Again this user has played on both brands which is why I still cannot comprehend why your opinion is very anti FX like you enjoy the brand stirring or something.

MOOGLEY, alex and a couple of others have had direct experience and none seem to exaggerate these differences you latch onto.

Martini1991 said:
But GPU's are rarely future proof, it's generally the CPU that lasts longer.
Click to expand...

This I do agree on.
 
You've misread Th0nt.

He's stating the FX is noticeably faster in modern games (Which is far from the truth, but lets pretend you haven't decided to let him off the hook with a blatant lie), I changed that to heavily thread, that play to the FX83's strengths, and it shows them at the margin of error.

Seriously, do you just want to try and 1 up me or something? Because it isn't going to happen, I don't have any bias, I just know a fair amount, and dislike FUD.
 
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Yes I am a blatant liar. I never had a 2500k and never suffered from stutter on it. Oh wait... here it is coming out of its box to giggle at Martini.

sctndi.jpg

I'm sure my invoice from overclockers dated 17 January 2011 (10:11 pm - approx 2 hours after setting my 955be on fire) wouldn't mind a giggle too!

We still haven't properly answered the OPs first question: would a 945 bottleneck a modern card. The answer is (and this may or may not be a blatant lie) it depends on the game.

Modern games (cryengine / frostbite / all future console ports) like core count and an i7/fx are winners. Your phenom is probably going to be ok for a lot of these titles. However, one reason the haswell and fx do so well in the most modern games is the instruction sets - the ivybridges and phenom will struggle in these, although the ivy's raw performance makes up for it where the phenom will fall.

In games like planetside 2, the i5 is unable to hold 60 fps, and all other cpus are lower than the i5 due to not being as fast in poorly threaded workloads. The game is currently being recoded for better threading, so that it runs well on the xbone and ps4 which are similar to the fx. The same is true for the arma series - although I get 45-50fps in arma 3 wasteland and no CPU can hold over 60fps in it.

Then you have my favourite game ns2, which is very poorly threaded/coded. My fx gets around 80-90 fps, unless on the biodome map where it drops to 55 in the central cap point. According to forum posts, phenoms really struggle with it.

Continuing my blatant lying, I have doctored some benchmarks to show how awesome the FX is:

http://www.techspot.com/review/615-far-cry-3-performance/page6.html

So the fx @ stock is basically same as a ivy-bridge i5 non-k. Given ivybridge is around 10-15% faster than sandybridge, it's safe to say the sandybridge i5 would have lost to the fx in that bench... That's if you fall for my lying of course! :-)
 
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BurntProc said:
In games like planetside 2, the i5 is unable to hold 60 fps, and all other cpus are lower than the i5 due to not being as fast in poorly threaded workloads. The game is currently being recoded for better threading, so that it runs well on the xbone and ps4 which are similar to the fx. The same is true for the arma series - although I get 45-50fps in arma 3 wasteland and no CPU can hold over 60fps in it.
Click to expand...

If I may interject (from all your blatant lying) I have just played some PS2 as it was not such as good experience when on my E8500 @ 3.7Ghz. I have logged some usage with fraps to see how the 7770's perform in this rig.

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
7627, 159153, 31, 101, 47.922
Click to expand...

Given that it only drops low when theres some humongous firefights on I am pretty pleased as on the older system it would drop into single figures.

When they release the optimised patch I will redo some tests but all in all it's very playable now on this machine.
 
Th0nt, I truly think you're just a troll now, you're literally in it to stir.

Someone's got to tell Ivy it's 10-15% better than Sandy too, because it isn't, the IPC gain is minimal, more like 7%, and then the 2500K overclocks (On average higher than Ivy, but again, lets not actually analyse anything.), and the i5 3470 @ 3.2GHZ is almost at the GPU bottleneck, so a clocked i5 2500K which would kill the locked i5 Ivy was stuttering everywhere? Hmm.

And I give up, there's no reasonable debate.
There's no point anymore.
 
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