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which socket am3+ cpu

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8 Mar 2012
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hello all. just wanted to ask if anyone can give me an idea of which cpu for a socket am3+ board would be a good buy at the moment. will be buying one in the next week or two, but not sure which would be the best of whats available. its for my sons pc which would be used mainly for gaming and video editing. has to be am3+ as we already have the motherboard which he got for xmas. also any advice with regards to whether the number of cores makes much of a difference with games/software that are in use now. as in would having a six or eight core really make much difference in performance over going for one of the four core black editions. all and any advice will be much appreciated. cheers.

thurles
 
If it has to be am3+ i'd get the 8120@8150 and overclock it as high as it'll possibly go.

That'll put it on par with maybe a i5 2300/2400 perhaps near a stock 2500 if you're lucky
 
Mabe a AM3 Phenom II X6 Second Hand.

Will be cheaper than a FX-8 and perform the same.

Or I would sell the board and buy a cheap H67 board along with a I5 2400 etc.

If you had a bit more money a X68 board and a I5 2500K.
 
Mabe a AM3 Phenom II X6 Second Hand.

Will be cheaper than a FX-8 and perform the same.

Or I would sell the board and buy a cheap H67 board along with a I5 2400 etc.

If you had a bit more money a X68 board and a I5 2500K.


Won't overclock as well though, and that's where the FX series catch up - and you need to take off the £20 cashback from AMD, and the £10 for deus ex from the price :p
 
Won't overclock as well though, and that's where the FX series catch up - and you need to take off the £20 cashback from AMD, and the £10 for deus ex from the price :p

The FX 8150 @ 3.6GHz is about 5-10% better than the PII 1100T BE @ 3.3GHz which is about the diffrence in clock speed also in some bench marks that don't use all the cores the PII 1100T is 3-4% better than the FX-8150.
 
thanks for the replies. so from what i understand, the six core phenom on am3 would be a good buy. can i get one of these on overclockers, or would they only be available second hand. don't seem to be able to find one on the site. the one i was looking at before i thought about asking here was this one
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-318-AM&groupid=701&catid=1967&subcat=1942
or am i paying more than is necessary and is there something as good for less. also am i right in thinking that 8 core cpus aren't utilised due to software and games not being able to use all the cores to full capacity, which is why i asked if a 4 core would be something worth considering, especially the 4.2 which looks pretty good to me and costs quite a lot less. would be interested to hear some more advice regarding this, as i'm a bit out of my depth with the newer hardware that's coming out now. the last time i put a pc together i used a dual core 2.2 and at the time it was one of the best amd cpus you could get. so as you can see i'm a bit behind the times.
 
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The FX-4 is a little bit quicker than the i3 2100.

The FX-8 is a slower than the i5 2500k @ stock.

But if they where both clocked @ 4.7GHz the FX-8 would be quite a lot slower than the FX-8.

What is the m/b in the machine now?
 
I would get him the fx 8120 that you posted and be done with it. Will be a nice system for games and video. :)

Agreed. Or perhaps the 6-core FX6200 is worth considering - higher clocked, it will run cooler, and he may not need 8 cores. May be better for games than the 8120 due to the clock, but probably slower at video encoding
 
Personally I would go with the Phenom II X6 1090T... Only need Bulldozer if you do stuff that requires a lot of cores.
 
Personally I would go with the Phenom II X6 1090T... Only need Bulldozer if you do stuff that requires a lot of cores.

Yes but 1090t's and most other Phenoms are bloody hard to get now. If the 81xx can pretty much match the phenoms in gaming, and certainly beat in other tasks such as video editing/encoding, then may as well get one of those, since they are actually available to buy new. Or as tuvoc says, maybe a 6200.
 
also used 1055T at 4.0, this 8120 is also running at that speed, can't say I have noticed a single negative difference, not in gaming, not in moving thing around, not in media use, not in day to day activities. in-fact would go as far to see it feels better than my old 1055T did even though there isn't a difference in clock speed, so the clock speed advantage K10.5 has over Bulldozer must be either A) really small or B) diminish as clock speed increases (most possible I think).

another thing I do with this processor is set-up custom overdrive profiles, they seem rather flexible and stable when it comes to messing around with clock speeds on the move, for example custom rule for Starcraft II is to increase frequency (quite a lot) on two modules (four cores) and decrease frequency and voltage on the others whilst setting Starcraft to run it on the boosted cores. works fairly well though you end up with half the processor running at 4.6 and the other half running at low frequency, low power settings. to be honest would just get your hands on a 8120 with the cash-back promotion for ~£125 - £130 and be done with it.

reason for that is because the X6 has given all it has to give, and although decent processors one has to assume that as programming progresses Bulldozer will see more and more 'friendly' programs where it'll start to stretch its legs and pull away from the older generations, so to put it short Bulldozer has more room for improvement on the software side of things, some programs hit a 'sweet spot' with the architecture and fly, whilst others tend to get a bit clogged up, that will be something that will likely improve as time goes on.
 
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