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Piledriver or Intel i5?

Sumer

Sumer

Sumer

Associate
Joined
26 Aug 2012
Posts
174
After having the itch to upgrade for a good few month but deciding to wait on the piledriver release im puzzled as to what to do, get a piledriver cpu or an intel i5k cpu. Im currently using a phenom 965 on am3+ motherboard so I wouldnt have to purchase a new mobo if I take the piledriver route and if this route is the best option im also planning to buy a 7950 to replace the 6950. I only use my pc for gaming and web browsing. Thanks in advance.

Phenom 965 @3.4
Asus M5A78L/usb3 mobo
2 x 4gb Corsair Vengeance @1600mhz
Sapphire 2gb HD 6950
 
If you have the Motherboard already get the Piledriver Chip, the i5 is not that much faster that it warrants spending $250 / £300 to change platforms, unless that's what you want to do.

You can overclock the 7950 as far as it will go and its not going to be a problem for the FX-83##

The FX-8350 is actually fairly competitive to the i5's
 
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If you play many games which use very lightly threaded engines the Core i5 tends to be better. I would say with newer multi-threaded engines the Core i5 and FX8300 would probably be not far off each other.
 
I play at 1920x1080. When looking at the piledrive cpu's available its only the 8350 that stuck out, a tad disappointed to say the least. Would I notice a bigger improvement in gaming going with 8350+7950 or 3570k+6950?
 
If I went down the intel route I do have a buyer for the phenom and mobo so that would be some extra money towards the upgrade. Ive heard too much about the gap in performance between intel and amd that im just goin to have to go with intel and see for myself. Intel i5 2500k/3570k + mobo it is then with a 7950 a few weeks later. Thanks for the input
 
3570k + mobo would be my advise ive been debating last few days waiting for pd and while its not totally and it really don't make any sense to go that way.

still might hang on a while longer as no real big games to push what i have now at 1920 . nothing really strenuous or really tasking other than bf3 till next october november.
 
if you have the mobo take the £150 upgrade. Most things the 8350 is on par with an i5.

i5 would mean a £300 upgrade and would be £150 more performance.

Spend the extra £150 on a better gpu if you need to spend that much you will get better perfomance gains from it
 
passey89 said:
if you have the mobo take the £150 upgrade. Most things the 8350 is on par with an i5.

i5 would mean a £300 upgrade and would be £150 more performance.

Spend the extra £150 on a better gpu if you need to spend that much you will get better perfomance gains from it
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I agree if you already have an AMD board you'd have to be nuts (Or an OCD fanboy.) or a money no object kind of guy to go i5.

I can see no reason as to why you would need to go Intel. PD goes up against (And beats a) a 3770k under certain conditons like encoding. (Encoding is actually useful to most users unlike 3d rendering!) All the reviews for gaming at 1080P and max detail show PD an i5 being a wash, so you wouldn't lose much if anything there either.

But yeah, if all you do is run Super Pi and play Half life 2 all day with V Sync off just to see how high your fraps counter can go you blow the extra £150.00.
 
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kitch9 said:
I agree if you already have an AMD board you'd have to be nuts (Or an OCD fanboy.) or a money no object kind of guy to go i5.

I can see no reason as to why you would need to go Intel. PD goes up against (And beats a) a 3770k under certain conditons like encoding. (Encoding is actually useful to most users unlike 3d rendering!) All the reviews for gaming at 1080P and max detail show PD an i5 being a wash, so you wouldn't lose much if anything there either.

But yeah, if all you do is run Super Pi and play Half life 2 all day with V Sync off just to see how high your fraps counter can go you blow the extra £150.00.
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or you just love WOW and must have over 200 fps
 
kitch9 said:
I know the hand bangers who try to say "Yeah, but 6 year old game X gets 200fps at 1024x768 on i5 , but only 150 fps on PD lolz111!" DRIVE ME NUTS!
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Emmmm...by that logic, in CPU demanding games that i5 can only do 60fps, the PD would only be doing 45fps, if someone got a graphic card that can do 60fps+.

Seriously...PD is basically just a Phenom II level performance CPU with a higher max clock and more cores...you'd have to be really biased to recommend it for gaming in this age.

And for WOW it is certainly not "OMGZ 150fps, 200fps" except for non-busy area which the player running around solo. People uses to get huge dip in frame rate even with their overclocked i5/i7 in towns/cities etc and it's lower than 60fps by far.

If you OP actually overclocked his Phenom II X4 to 4.0GHz, then the only benefit of PD would be higher max clock (but above 4.6GHz is unrealistic because of the crazy high power consumption) and more cores of he went for a PD 6 or 8 cores (which still not benefit in most games considering most only uses 2-3 cores, with occasion games that would use 4 and very few rare occasion games that benefit from more than 4 cores).

Bottomline is, if upgrade involved upgrading motherboard as well, then there's little reason to go AMD for gaming. PD is only good choice for people that already got a AM3+ board and don't want to pay the extra for a new board. Also, comparing a Phenom II X4 at 4.0 to a PD at 4.6GHz is pretty much just an average of 15% increase in performance, if games don't use more than 4 cores.
 
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Marine-RX179 said:
Emmmm...by that logic, in CPU demanding games that i5 can only do 60fps, the PD would only be doing 45fps, if someone got a graphic card that can do 60fps+.

Seriously...PD is basically just a Phenom II level performance CPU with a higher max clock and more cores...you'd have to be really biased to recommend it for gaming in this age.

And for WOW it is certainly not "OMGZ 150fps, 200fps" except for non-busy area which the player running around solo. People uses to get huge dip in frame rate even with their overclocked i5/i7 in towns/cities etc and it's lower than 60fps by far.

If you OP actually overclocked his Phenom II X4 to 4.0GHz, then the only benefit of PD would be higher max clock (but above 4.6GHz is unrealistic because of the crazy high power consumption) and more cores of he went for a PD 6 or 8 cores (which still not benefit in most games considering most only uses 2-3 cores, with occasion games that would use 4 and very few rare occasion games that benefit from more than 4 cores).

Bottomline is, if upgrade involved upgrading motherboard as well, then there's little reason to go AMD for gaming. PD is only good choice for people that already got a AM3+ board and don't want to pay the extra for a new board.
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How many single threaded games today max out at 60fps because of CPU limitation at 1080p? None is your answer, there is no logic in your post.

Hell a AMD A8 hardly bottlenecks BF3....

Why are we worrying about WOW?

So with PD you can play pretty much every game at 1080p with the same FPS as your fellow i5 owner, general day to day office tasks there will be no difference and you can knock your fellow i5 owner out the park when it comes to encoding all for the same price of said i5 owner. The quicker encoding time will pretty lessen the gap between power draw too as PD will spend less time a full throttle than the i5.

The chip is good value for money for what it is. Its a £150 chip.
 
I can always understand the desire to upgrade and have a play with new tech but I'd have thought the improvement you see in most games at 1080p from moving to PD or an i5 from your current 965 will be fairly small compared to just getting the new 7950?
 
kitch9 said:
How many single threaded games today max out at 60fps because of CPU limitation at 1080p? None is your answer, there is no logic in your post.

Hell a AMD A8 hardly bottlenecks BF3....

Why are we worrying about WOW?

So with PD you can play pretty much every game at 1080p with the same FPS as your fellow i5 owner, general day to day office tasks there will be no difference and you can knock your fellow i5 owner out the park when it comes to encoding all for the same price of said i5 owner. The quicker encoding time will pretty lessen the gap between power draw too as PD will spend less time a full throttle than the i5.

The chip is good value for money for what it is. Its a £150 chip.
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It's not just single-threaded game...there are still plenty of 2-3 cores games that the AMD CPU would hold back the graphic cards from hitting 60fps. There are more to gaming than just single-player run-throughs of FPS and action games.

As for BF3 performance, rather than going by the generic benches that are plastered all over the web, someone actual posted a bench based on the 64 player maps and the AMD 4 cores CPUs were clearly behind by quite at margin...and we are not talking about frane rate at 60fps, but the average frame rate over time that were below 60fps.

Strictly speaking from gaming performance point of view, there are many reason to get the Intel over the AMD (i.e. 120Hz gaming, mmos gaming etc, faster at stock and with 39~45% overclocking headroom rather than 10-20% overclocking headroom ), but there isn't any the other way round.

Either way...from my experience I know there's little point trying to convince stubborn people that are already with their mind made up and refuse to listen. Keep believing what you wanna believe if it makes you happy, but don't give ill advise to people who are only interested in getting the most gaming performance for their money and don't give a crack about encoding performance.

I already mentioned that for people that already got AM3+ board the PD might worth considering, but realistically the OP would be better off just overclocking his existing CPU, as the PD simply isn't that much faster than the Phenom II (if at all) at the same clock, and the extra cores at above 4 cores rarely benefit games in general.
 
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