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Will I regret going AMD?

marvluslf

marvluslf

marvluslf

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Joined
1 Jul 2012
Posts
12
I've just finished purchasing the parts for my first build and im just awaiting for the arrival of the graphics card. The last time I had a PC was about 7-8 years ago before it decided it wanted to die and from what I remember AMD where pretty much well respected and a good choice, however I now see that intel seem to be the weapon of choice especially the i5 for gaming. I decided to go with phenom II x4 965 due to price/performance but after purchasing I researched more and found out that literally everyone went on about the i5. Will I regret going down the AMD route? From what ive read AMD will not be doing much in the way of desktop cpu's in the future, and that games are more GPU than CPU these days. So will I notice much difference in gaming between a phenom II 965 and an i5 running the same card? thanks.
 
Honestly, the 965 is a great chip though if you were planning on running a high end card such as a GTX 670 or simular you would see a big difference as the Phenom would start to bottleneck.

The i5/i7's don't have this problem, so you will get better overall performance.

The Phenom's are still great chips. It's bulldozer which isn't stacking upto sandybridge/ivybridge.
 
If you are running a single card, single screen setup 1920 x 1200 or 1080, you should not get any issues with the 965BE x4 CPU being good enough for gaming. My equivalent 1090T is plenty fast enough although I have only used it with my 6950 gfx card.
 
I had no doubts the phenom was a good cpu and I was originally going to get the fx range then I seen the disappointing reviews then I read about the amd bottlenecking issue. When reading these things half way through buying a build makes you a bit doubtful especially when your spending your hard earned. Would overclocking the cpu increase gaming performance or would this be a waste of time?
 
marvluslf said:
I had no doubts the phenom was a good cpu and I was originally going to get the fx range then I seen the disappointing reviews then I read about the amd bottlenecking issue. When reading these things half way through buying a build makes you a bit doubtful especially when your spending your hard earned. Would overclocking the cpu increase gaming performance or would this be a waste of time?
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Wouldn't be a waste of time what-so-ever. Overclocking will help reduce the potential bottleneck you may have. And it will obviously increase the CPU's performance, add a few more FPS to games.
 
I have just bought parts today for a new intel build, moving from my phenom II setup.

In a lot of my games (BF3, Shogun 2, Skyrim) @1920x1080 I was getting low GPU usage. Looking at benchmarks for Ivybridge compared to my current CPU, I felt it was time to upgrade to make the most of my GPU, but then I do have a GTX 680.

As long as you don't have a top end card I think you should be OK. What GPU were you thinking of?
 
Im on the same boat at the moment, saving up for ivybridge setup as my current 955be chip seems to be bottlenecking me and not letting my gtx 680 use its full potential. If i look at the gpu usage charts i can see it bouncig up and down jumping from 80% usage down to as low as 50%!

This is with my 955 overclocked aswel. But like others have said, if you're not running anything high end graphics wise you'll should be fine.
 
I'll be running a Radeon HD6950 2GB. I planned on doing a 'budget' build but once I started doing more research I was worried about regretting my buy. I just want a capable gaming pc, been using a xbox 360 for the past 4 years and playing a fps on a controller I cant get use to. Keyboard and mouse all the way
 
Probably won't be too much of a bottleneck with that card, but it wouldn't hurt to overclock. But in answer to your original question, the i5 option would be better.
 
marvluslf said:
I'll be running a Radeon HD6950 2GB. I planned on doing a 'budget' build but once I started doing more research I was worried about regretting my buy. I just want a capable gaming pc, been using a xbox 360 for the past 4 years and playing a fps on a controller I cant get use to. Keyboard and mouse all the way
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I have the same setup, a Phenom II x4 965 and a 6950. My 965 is overclocked to 3.8ghz and I definitely recommend that, little effort really involved and it nets you a decent performance gain.

You won't see any bottlenecking, and you'll get excellent performance in games, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Of course, were you to replace that card and buy a better one, you would see a bit of bottlenecking.
 
You won't see much bottlenecking at all with a 6950, perhaps lower minimums, but overall an acceptable performance all around.
Problem is when it comes to upgrading your GPU, your Phenom II would run out of steam, which would mean your next upgrade needs to be CPU/Mobo/GPU.
 
As long as you stay the hell away from mmos or CPU demanding games like Total Wars or Starcraft II the bottleneck shouldn't be too bad with the 6950.

But if your purchase of AMD parts (CPU and and motherboard) is still within the DSR period, then I would say it probably would be a good idea to send them back and go Intel platform instead.
 
Marine-RX179 said:
As long as you stay the hell away from mmos or CPU demanding games like Total Wars or Starcraft II the bottleneck shouldn't be too bad with the 6950.

But if your purchase of AMD parts (CPU and and motherboard) is still within the DSR period, then I would say it probably would be a good idea to send them back and go Intel platform instead.
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+1
 
If you are really worried about it and are within the return period then you probably should return the stuff, that said the 965 looks like a nice little CPU and the fact it's half the price of an i5 makes it pretty good value.

You might have a more expensive upgrade path in future, but from my experience in building my own systems for something like 14 years I can honestly say I think only once or twice have I upgraded the CPU and not changed the motherboard at the same time. That's usually because I wait until it's worth upgrading the whole lot, RAM included, rather than the temporary measure of putting in a new chip as the cost and limited supply of older CPUs usually make it more sensible to invest the extra in the latest version with a new MB rather than an older one as a stop gap.

Reading up it seems to overclock really well to around 4Ghz easily and perhaps even further which for an £80 CPU sounds good to me, I also just like having something different sometimes, had a lot of good AMD chips in the past and would be happy to have another if the bang for buck was right.

If I were you I'd keep it, build it and enjoy it.
 
KraniX said:
If you are really worried about it and are within the return period then you probably should return the stuff, that said the 965 looks like a nice little CPU and the fact it's half the price of an i5 makes it pretty good value.
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But the thing is for same price level, the SandyBridge i3 offer the same/better gaming performance, but without the down side of losing performance because games use less than 4 cores.
 
The performance of a Phenom II X4 @ 3.5Ghz will deffo show some bottlenecks with even a medium spec graphics card. I know with old overclocked GTX 460 World of Warcraft would dip to about 25fps at times on raids/busy cities, and BF3 would drop to about 35 minimum on 64 player maps so if you can deal with that then it's not too bad, but ultimately an i5 would have been HUGELY better in the long run.
 
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