Wanting to upgrade - AMD CPU

[Omaeka]

I'm currently running an AMD FX-4100 Bulldozer Quad Core 3.62ghz CPU on a ASUS M5A78L-M LX motherboard. I'm looking to upgrade at some point but really have no idea where to start, google searches tell me that the AMD 1100T Phenom II Six-Core 3.2ghz is the best for gaming, but it has two cores and 1ghz less power than the FX-8150 8-Core.

Bah! I'm confusing myself just typing this can anyone tell me both or either of the following:

A.) The best 3 AMD gaming CPU's on the market?

B.) Whether or not I could get an i5/i7 into my rig, but I don't think my motherboard supports them? If so, what are the best i5 and i7 CPU's?

If you know anything about graphics cards and would like to give me some advice, I also have a thread here:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?p=22138787

Thanks!

 

[Omaeka]

Go Intel, H61 board and an i5.

Your FX4100 has pitiful IPC.
Most games use 4 or less threads, so having an 8 core is pointless, also GHZ isn't everything, so the Phenom II X6 1100T will generally spank an FX8150 in gaming, hell in gaming a Pentium G620 can put up a fight in lesser threaded titles.

Thanks but I don't want to change motherboards so I'm happy to stay AMD for now, as money isn't exactly flooding in but I would like to be able to play more demanding games. Do you have any idea what the definitive AMD gaming CPU's are? I've read numerous articles on the internet and none of it really makes a whole deal or sense to me.

Thanks!

Even with less cores and lower speed the Phenom II X4/X6 is still better for gaming. This is because it has higher IPC (Instructions Per Clock) than Bulldozer, meaning it can do more per clock. Also games at most use 4 cores, so any extra cores won't be used at all.

If you can grab a Phenom II X4 960T then you can unlock it to a 6 core and overclock it close to 4ghz. This will be the best for your money.

Or even better, sell your CPU and mobo and buy an i3/i5 with an LGA 1155 board.

I want to stick with AMD if no Intel can go with my rig at the moment, I'm also completely wet behind the ears when it comes to PC hardware so I'm pretty worried about ever overclocking something, is there a CPU within the £175 price range that comes standard with high power for gaming?

Thanks!

 

[Omaeka]

Best rounded CPU for AMD would have to be either a Phenom II 960T (Preferably unlocked) and the AMD Phenom II 1100T/1090T.

Note these are both rather old compared to your FX4100.
Upgrading to technology a year and a half older than what you have?

You'll need to switch the board eventually, the Phenom II upgrade will give you no where near the amount of future proofing an i5 and h61 upgrade would give you in terms of CPU power.

Well there tons of gamers using AMD rigs, but if I really should swap to intel, how in gods name do I change a motherboard? It sounds difficulty and risky, but then again I have not got the slightest clue about this stuff.

 

[Omaeka]

Agreed, and I used to be one of them, but that doesn't mean Intel aren't better.
There's a reason you see Graphics cards get reviewed with Intel CPU's.
Changing motherboard is pretty easy, except it's basically a full rebuild.

A full rebuild? So I'd have to get a new HDD and RAM?

 

[Omaeka]

Oh no.
I mean, switching a motherboard entails removing GPU etc from the case etc, so when you put the new board in, it's like a full rebuild of the PC (In the process)

Does that mean all the wiring too? :| putting the power supply blah blah? Is there some kind of little magical hardware gnome I can find to do all this for me?

 

[Omaeka]

It means wiring everything back to the motherboard yeah.
However it's also very good practice.
My first experience that got me into PC building was motherboard exchanging.

I'll definitely look into Intel, what is the absolute best motherboard for one? I can't say I'm looking forward to swapping over if I do though, probably won't have a PC left.

Also, can I get one final verdict on the very best AMD for gaming, baring in mind I'm not looking to spend over £200.

Thanks!

All you do is take out the graphics card, unplug everything connected to the motherboard, take the motherboard out, take the RAM out, place the Intel CPU into the new motherboard with the cooler, slot the RAM into the new motherboard, place the motherboard in, replug everything including the graphics card, and you're done. May need to reinstall 7 but you might be able to avoid this.

With the cooler? What do you mean, would I have to buy a cooling system with an Intel? If by a long stretch I do end up going to Intel, a reformat seems like a horrible consequence most of my games are on Steam and take me absolutely ages to download again.

One last thing; apparently I have to keep myself grounded when working on a PC so I don't blow up? What?

 

[Omaeka]

As Martini as mentioned, the best AMD gaming CPUs are the 960T or the 1090T/1100T.

All retail CPUs come with a cooler so don't worry about that.

You can move the steamapps folder to the new install, so all you do is back it up and no need to redownload. But as I said there's a good chance you don't have to reinstall Windows.

Guide here: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7418-YUBN-8129

As for grounding yourself, honestly all I do is plug the PSU into the mains, and touch it every now and then to "ground" myself (The PSU is off). Other people have different methods of grounding themselves.

I'll keep those AMD in mind, from the looks of it a good i5 and a new mobo is about the same price range as a top AMD, so its a no brainer to go the Intel route, oh god. Any luck I think I know a friend of the family who's changed countless hardware, but should I do it for the experience?

TBH,Vishera will be out in the next few months and will work with the motherboard the OP has. By then the desktop IB Core i3 CPUs will also be out,so the OP will have a better choice of CPUs to choose from.

If I had an FX4100,I would wait until then. Its not the world's best CPU for gaming,but at normal resolutions you should still be able to get reasonable framerates in many games.

Remember,most reviews are using GTX580,GTX680 and HD7970 cards,so the differences will be more exaggerated. You have an HD6850 1GB which is far less powerful.

What is Vishera? I'm pretty sure the card I want is the overclocked 7850, cheap and almost reaches 7970 range from what I've read, but if I go Intel am I best off using a Nvidia with it? If so whats a comparable Nvidia to the 7850?

To be honest, you could do something like this ;
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-407-IN&groupid=701&catid=6&subcat=567

www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-205-MS&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=2265

Allows you Crossfire in the future etc.

The cooler comes with the CPU.

That whole crossfire malarky sounds over my limits, but never the less...

(•_•)
( •_•)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)

Time to get studying.

Thanks!

 

[Omaeka]

Vishera is AMD's new set of CPU's, but they could be months off, hell, it's AMD, probably early 2013.
It'll MAYBE bring IPC upto Core 2/Phenom II, it's not worth the gamble if you can make an investment in an Intel set up now.

AMD GPU and Intel CPU is perfectly fine, 7850 OC'ed is brilliant.

The mobo and proc you linked me to come to £230 altogether, how much better is that setup than my Bulldozer and also one of the top AMD's?

Thanks!

 

[Omaeka]

Much better for CPU limited games.

Edit!!

What games are you playing??

Is it something like BF3 or something like Diablo 3??

Well at the moment I play;

Diablo III, Fear 3, Arma II, Torchlight, Rune Classic, Lord of the Rings Online, Sniper Elite V2, Risen 2, Street Fighter x Tekken, Max Payne 3, Indie titles and the only one that I suffer performance issues in; Skyrim.

While you're on a 6850, you might not/won't notice much if any difference, on higher end GPU's you'd notice quite a difference.

The i5 3550 will have a lot of CPU power in the tank for gaming over an FX8150/FX8120.

Sell your current stuff and you'll likely garner 100 quid or something to offset the cost, which is less than an FX8 would cost you in the first place.

Only problem with the Ivy i5 is that you can't overclock it, however you do gain PCI-E 3.0 (Which may take more precedent in future generations)

CPU wise and motherboard wise you're future proof for as long as you could be.

On the AMD set up your CPU would run out of steam and you'd eventually PCI-E Bandwidth limit yourself (When this happens is anyones guess, but that's something that won't happen on the Intel setup)

I'm not gonna lie, most of that made no sense to me but I get that Intel are better for the long run, but somewhat more expensive and more work, whereas AMD are better for the short term with little to no effort. Something to consider also would be the need to upgrade both G and CPU's at the same time, to avoid them holding one another back if done seperately?

Thanks!

 

[Omaeka]

There's no real difference in effort between the two, and these days I wouldn't say AMD are better for the short term.
When you originally bought yourself a set up, if you'd gone Intel with say an i3 on socket 1155, you'd easily be able to update to an ivy i7 for example or had gone the i7 in the first place.

The CPU upgrade I'd do first, as I can't see there being anything shaking things up.
The GPU upgrade would be limited on the FX4100 when the GPU is overclocked imo.

At the same time is good, but it's your call, I'd do the CPU and motherboard upgrade first, gets you into the PC stuff.

Thats what I was thinking, if I have an okay graphics card but a poop processor, its a no brainer which one should go first. How much would you price a mint condition Bulldozer FX-4100 3.62 at?

 

[Omaeka]

What is being said is spend £230 but unless you upgrade the GPU as well you won't get much of a performance change.

Keep the current system and upgrade the GPU but you may be limited by the CPU at some point.

Can't price check out of members market.
Although I'd have to say your FX and 6850 are about equal (As in they both can push each other)
Your frame rate may be more consistent on an Intel, but not enough to constitute the 230 pound investment unless you do a GPU upgrade relatively soon (Or at least are definitely intending to and can afford both)

Actually the thing is no matter what CPU you stick onto the AM3+ board, they simply won't make too much an improvement (if at all) on gaming performance.

I'm with Martini1991 on this one...the improvement you get for going from AMD to Intel is well worth the effort and the money. Getting a FX8150/FX8120 won't really improve the gaming performance, as they are pretty much same CPU as the FX4100 but with more cores and different clock speed...and having more cores over four cores won't really help, as 90%+ of the games still uses only 3 cores or less. So basically you will only be throwing good money after bad.

I recall Martini1991 being a long time AMD users...and with him jumped boat, went Intel and now recommend you this he knows what he's talking about.

So long story short, I should upgrade to an i5 sharpish and then look for an 7850 afterwards? I'd say short term (until about August) I can afford one or the other, so logic would have me upgrade mobo+proc first?

Thanks!

 

[Omaeka]

I think as Martini1991 says,the Core i3 2100 would have been a good choice in the first place. I have one,but TDP was the main reason,as my rig is quite small and the lower TDP SB CPUs were silly money. Luckily,IB is not so bad in that regards,so I will eventually change over to them.

Skyrim is demanding as it uses only two threads. However,have you tried to play around with the settings and drivers,to see if you can improve peformance?

Silly question - I assume you got a decent PSU when you bought the rig? If you are changing over to an overclocked HD7850 2GB,it will still consume more power in that state than your HD6850.

I've found a compromise with Skyrim at the moment, got the unreal cinema ENB, 2k Texture Pack LITE (2x vanilla resolutions) on medium base graphical settings (no AA with FXAA and 8x antistrophic, with about average medium draw distance on actors, objects, land detail etc)

It ran perfectly until I got the 2k LITE 2x resolution Texture Pack now its decent and playable, but not perfect. Which is weird as when I first got my PC I ran it with the 2k Texture Pack FULL which had 8x he resolution of vanilla with little to no problems, then I decided to swap to the official HD texture pack and then it ran poorly, rebuilt my Skyrim again on the setup I have now and I can't even run it perfectly with the 2x textures let alone the 8x, with no trace of the official HD texture pack anywhere, did it blow my hardware? LOL

I believe my power supply is a OCZ ZS 750W PSU.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-210-OK

This is my rig, but with a 6850 and Windows Ultimate x86.

Oh God, please don't remind me.
I did the whole AMD thing, AM2+ Phenom II, over to an AM3 790FX board, over to an AM3 890FX board when I simply couldn't go ahead anymore, my 6870's were so ridiculously bottlenecked by my 1055T at 4.37GHZ it was getting silly, I gained 40 FPS in Dawn Of War 2 going to a 2500k.

I used to justify it with "Yeah, but you can't tell the difference".

If I'd have gone Intel straight off the bat I'd have saved rather a lot of money.

Also, Phenom II was Core 2 IPC (or around there) with the FX4100 being slower than Phenom II clock for clock, a 3.6GHZ should best an FX4100 in a lot of situations, there's almost half a decade between the CPU's too.

So I really shouldn't of even gone AMD shame really, I quite like the company and all. I'll go Intel when I have the £££.

 

[Omaeka]

It's not that they're "bad", it's just they're not as good as Intel, and their latest line up is a disgrace.

Lowering their own price/performance in some instances.
AMD can be good if second hand, take a Phenom II X2 BE, you can pick them up for like 30-40 quid, some can unlock to full fledge Phenom II X4's, overclock one to 4GHZ and that's incredible performance for the money.

I prefer higher AMD tier boards, take this ; http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-461-AS&groupid=701&catid=1903&subcat=2046

Lovely looking board, to get that type of board (Which I have) costs insane money;
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-475-AS&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=1990


I have the P67 variant though.

EDIT : The FX line are really bad on Skyrim aren't they? CPU limited like hell by all accounts.

Skyrim is the main thing I'll be running when I play PC that is actually seriously demanding, its just so good with mods! What your basically saying is what somebody said to me a few months ago when I got my PC, AMD is a poor mans Intel, which it is! The only logical time to get an AMD is when you want mid end PC performance on a budget, I don't know why I went into this hoping to hit top tier performance on an AMD machine, least I got a good PSU and a nice case and HDD though!

Cool! Your PSU would be enough for two HD7870 cards let alone a single HD7850!!

I can crossfire on this motherboard and this processor right?

Step 1) Upgrade to Intel i5

Step 2) Upgrade to HD 7850

Step 3) Crossfire to 2x HD 7850

Step 4) ???

Step 5) Enter the Matrix.

 

[Omaeka]

You might not need to upgrade you 6850 just yet if you are ok with playing games with slightly lower graphic settings.

To help you get a clearer idea on graphic card vs CPU, let me put it this way...

If you had a fast CPU that's capable of deliver 60fps+ but your graphic card can only deliver 25-40fps at max graphic settings, you could always reduce graphic details to help improve frame rate and push it closer toward 60fps;

but if you had graphic card that can do 60fps+ at max setting, but CPU is only capable of delivering 30-40fps, then there's much you can do to push the frame rate to above 30-40fps, and adusting graphic settings won't help.

Hope this make sense to you.

I'm stupid when it comes to hardware but I get the theoretical's CPU can limit performance regardless of the graphical quality, whereas a GPU can only increase performance if the CPU can actually cope with it aswell. I'd say a CPU is a more integral part of the machine then.

You can probably overclock that 6850 to 950MHZ using Asus GPU Tweak (Has quite a VRM library)
I run my brothers 6850 at 950MHZ with a Pentium dual core G620.

Are you talking about my graphics card from my other thread? I'm using the CCC at the moment, it seems to do the job.

 

[Omaeka]

OP needs Windows 64 bit too.
You'll have 10GB of RAM with a 7850 (2GB G card, 8GB system) 32 bit (x86) can only address 4GB total, so your Skyrim issues may/may not be RAM limitation but I doubt it.

But you will likely encounter issues with the 7850 2GB if you don't get 64 bit.
Thankfully Windows 7 32 bit keys and interchangeable with 64 bit keys.

My bad, I have 64 bit, I thought x86 was the smart mans way of saying 64 bit. I have 8GB system RAM, DDR3 @ 1100Mhz I think?

Cool! Your PSU would be enough for two HD7870 cards let alone a single HD7850!!

Strange issue,you are having - I assume you didn't pour some Skyrrum onto your PC:

http://greatcocktailrecipes.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/elderflower-scrolls-skyyrum-elder.html



So,even after you re-installed the game,it started to have issues?? Maybe a game update or driver update has broken something?? Have you had a look on the Bethsoft forums or any of the dedicated Skyrim ones?? Its worth a look.

Wow! that drink looks awesome!

I really have no idea what happened, but in short;

Got my PC, bought Skyrim retail, cracked it to avoid having to use Steam (I was anti-steam at this time until a friend opened my eyes ) and then I got the 2K Texture Pack FULL which is something like 4096x4096 resolution which is huge compared to the official HD texture pack which is 2048 x 2048 and ran it with a 'summer' ENB on ULTRA (I kid you not, I ran it on ultra as those were the settings it detected for me) and it ran fine, wasn't perfect, had some stuttering etc. but definitely playable. Then I got the official HD texture pack off Steam and installed that and BOOM, my entire experience went to **** and could barely run it, it was 30+ fps on average but the amount of stutters when I panned the camera was immense.

^ That was all on a 1280x720 monitor.

Now I have a 1440x900 monitor and slightly struggling to run it with the 2K Texture LITE (2048x2048 resolution) pack and the unreal cinema ENB.

Don't think it was the resolution change though that's doing it, I far outspec the system requirements for the 2K LITE @ 1980x1080, let alone 1440x900.

MSI Afterburner is better for overclocking AMD cards.

Isn't that just for temp monitoring during gameplay?

 

[Omaeka]

Damn, thought I was being awesome.
32 bit is X86 and 64 bit is X64.

Strange that 32 bit has a higher number as an X or whatever how come?

Nah.
It's one of my preferred OC'ing tools, but it has quite a VRM library limitation in regards to none reference cards and the developer is an arrogant *****.

VRM Library? I feel so stupid.

No point in changing that CPU for another amd chip, just wasting cash. Either stick with what you have or do a complete Intel rebuild.

That's the conclusion we've come too shame though that AMD have to fall so far behind when it comes to end game.

 

[Omaeka]

Couldn't tell you on the first part, and second part, VRM is voltage regulation, to increase voltage, which is paramount for getting higher overclocks.

So I'm better off using CCC to overclock and MSI to monitor ingame temps? I don't mind using two programs, I use about 5 to mod Skyrim.

 

[Omaeka]

No.
Use MSI to do both.
CCC can't overvolt.
MSI can overvolt, but doesn't have the same VRM compatibility as GPU Tweak/Sapphire Trixx.

Jesus Christ, how many programs are there? Which one should I use then?

Thanks.

 

[Omaeka]

Overvolt is raising the voltage, which can be done with MSI Afterburner lol.

I know, I had a stupid moment cause you explained before didnt you hoping to edit it before you noticed.

So I should use MSI Afterburner, yes?

 

[Omaeka]

Yes use MSI Afterburner

Before I start, should I set CCC back to default settings, or will MSI detect the work I've done in CCC?