Intel Upgrade or Stick with AMD

korgtronix

korgtronix

korgtronix

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I am little stuck, I want to upgrade my rig to improve my gaming and have a decent upgrade path but I am at a cross roads as to whether I should stick with AMD and get myself a Piledriver chip with a newer motherboard or to switch to Intel and get the best for a similar price and upgrade again in the future.

My Current Rig:
FX-8120 at stock
Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3
16gb Corsair Vengeance 1866mhz
Sapphire 7850 OC Edition
Crucial M4 60gb SSD
Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm 1tb drive

The Games I play
Mass Effect 1-3
Skyrim
Shogun Total War 2
Empire Total War
Killing Floor

I have a budget of around £200 for the upgrade and I am in no rush to upgrade this week as I want to hunt for the best deal first.
 
i'd stick with what you have got tbh, you wont see any difference spending 200 on a upgrade, a faster and bigger sdd would make little real difference, a larger hdd might give you more space, but add nothing to gaming apart from that, a different vga card might give you a few extra fps, if that.

keep your money and wait till something totally better comes out

you your memory better, read up on ram drives, 20x faster than the fastest sdd, try that as it wont cost you nothing at you already have more than enough ram, and your games will see more of a boost than doing anything else for 200 that is.
 
I guess it depends how well your current system performs. A Intel i5 would perform better, but is it worth that money to upgrade? With the release of the new consoles to it seems likely that games will take advantage of more threads which may help your AMD in the future.

I'd personally stick with your AMD and overclock it. As far as I'm aware Bulldozers can overclock a fair bit so it may be worth looking into that to increase performance :)
 
Smoogels said:
I guess it depends how well your current system performs. A Intel i5 would perform better, but is it worth that money to upgrade? With the release of the new consoles to it seems likely that games will take advantage of more threads which may help your AMD in the future.

I'd personally stick with your AMD and overclock it. As far as I'm aware Bulldozers can overclock a fair bit so it may be worth looking into that to increase performance :)
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But that is not a solution to OP's current situation is it? Even if future games uses multi-cores better, it does nothing for existing/older games which OP plays...and all those games he listed, I believe none of them are optimised to even use up to 4 cores fully.

If OP want to improve performance for these games for £200, then getting 2nd hand parts/bundle for i5 2500K would seem to be the most sensible option, and performance wise for those games it would be HUGE increase over his current Bulldozer (especially with the huge bottleneck he's having with the Bulldozer together with a 7850), consider those games only uses 1-3 cores on average.
 
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intel i5 fanboy alert, the cpu and 7850 are very good, and cause no huge bottleneck, if you run every game mentioned above at ultra and i play them all except Killing Floor, it wouldn't matter what you played them on, none are 4 core optimized at all, so having more cores or less would make no difference as it's how they were programed,faster mhz would help, more ram, quicker ram, faster sdd would make no difference, a faster card might get a few extra fps max, better to alter setting in game and live with what he has, as it's the game type and games he and myself play, i have same amount of ram and the next vga card up and a i7, games aren't optimized well at all for multi core, i played them just as well on dual care than my 4 core i7, only the extra speed makes any difference, so an over clock would help, and cost the price of betting cooling, so again stick with what you have, you won't see any HUGE jump im performance with an i5, anyone who say's any different just doesn't play those games, sorry bad advice

changing the m/b and cpu for a few frames more isn't a huge improvement in my book and isn't worth the extra 200 spent, better to keep your money in your wallet and replace the whole rig next year when hopefully something more worth while is out, a lot faster card for half the price of what they are now etc etc
 
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zakblood said:
intel i5 fanboy alert
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Not in these forums mate, you only get good, solid un-biased advice here ;)



zakblood said:
changing the m/b and cpu for a few frames more isn't a huge improvement in my book and isn't worth the extra 200 spent, better to keep your money in your wallet and replace the whole rig next year when hopefully something more worth while is out, a lot faster card for half the price of what they are now etc etc
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AGREED, save your money or spend it all on an epic night out but dont upgrade just yet.


P.S im sure some of these threads are started just to cause a melee, lol
I think ill start a thread says "BULLDOZER IS THE BEST FOR GAMING BECAUSE THE ROCK SAID SO AND ALL THE CORES GET USED IN EVERY GAME EVER MADE BECAUSE THE ROCK SAID SO"
 
Spending £150(occasionally this pice) on a fx8350 will make you feel better about having more efficient arcitecture, higher IPC etc but real world game performance will not increase much.

As oliver said ^

Do you overclock? and what cooler do you have? I'd invest in a decent cooler like a H100 or a kueler 920 and some good thermal compound to use - Gellid GX extreme. You could use this with future upgrades as well.
 
zakblood said:
intel i5 fanboy alert, the cpu and 7850 are very good, and cause no huge bottleneck, if you run every game mentioned above at ultra and i play them all except Killing Floor, it wouldn't matter what you played them on, none are 4 core optimized at all, so having more cores or less would make no difference as it's how they were programed,faster mhz would help, more ram, quicker ram
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Em...you do realise you are making no sense?

You yourself claims that high MHz would help, and logic behind that is because it "processing power has increased". For CPU it's not just about MHz, but how much processing power can a CPU deliver, under the circumstance of number of threads used is specified by the program (so architecture of the CPU comes into play as well). When a program can only use 1-3 cores, having CPU that has greater processing power/single-threaded performance would deliver higher frame rate, when it is not GPU limited in CPU demanding games, I am certain the 7850 would have the GPU usage frequently dipping down to 60% with the 8120.

Even with Intel out of the picture, even predecessor Phenom II would be faster in those games. Bulldozer is a poor CPU for gaming, and to claim it is good...

Simply put, if OP doesn't wish to spend the money, it is completely up to him to stick with what he's currently using; but if he already have that £200 set aside and is ready for upgrade, the 2nd hand i5 2500K path is what would give him the most performance increase for the budget...if the that's what the OP want that is.

Just random google some benchmark of some semi-CPU demanding games that are known to use less than 4 cores, they would all clearly show the Bulldozer FX-8 falls behind even the i3, and a overclocked i5/i7 would give at least 10-20fps higher in frame rate. I would love to recommend going for a PD, if not for the fact that it would only be like 8-12% increase in performance over what he's currently using.

Oh I'm sorry, but I must be a big pathetic Intel fanboy for pointing that out. It is ALL MY FAULT that AMD doesn't have a much faster CPU for the OP to upgrade to :rolleyes:
 
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funny how one says spend when every one else says stick with what you have, let poster decide on whats good advice and whats just plain poor advice :)

but any advice is free, so take your pick, 11 posts so far only one saying spend / upgrade etc
 
I wouldn't upgrade either, especially to a dead 1155 dead socket.
I would look again in 6months and decide then
 
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