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Worth upgrading from phenom II 1100t?

T C

T C

T C

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13 Nov 2002
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Hi all,
Just a quicky!

I currently have an Asus sabertooth 990fx (rev 1) with a 480gtx and a Phenom 1100t oc to 4.2Ghz (well something like 4.186 :D).

I'm tempted to go down the upgrade path of a gtx770 and wondered if it would be worth the extra £140 to get the fx8350 cpu also?

I've not been keeping abreast of latest cpu's etc but from what I've read and the o/c I have on the cpu at present, I wouldn't really see a massive improvement?

Am I right in my assumption or am I missing something?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!
 
Not really worth it..

You won't see a big increase in gaming performance, that is for sure.

On another note, i think you'd be better off with a 280X, rather than a 770. That's just based on PvP at the moment.
 
Thanks for the reply!

I've been a Nvidia fanboy for years so was just going to stick with them :D Dumb loyalty!

I didn't think there was much difference between the 280x and the 770, though I would probably get a r290? trying to get a waterblock for it could be a problem!

Now you've got me thinking about GPU's now :( more headaches!
 
i wouldnt go for a big card like that with that cpu they are still pretty decent but you will be hampering quite a bit.

6950/6970/7850/480 is about perfect anymore is just bottlenecked.
 
So what cpu have you got to use???

I'm only using a single monitor and won't be going above 1920x1080? I just want to run BF4 at ultra :D
 
Don't bother upgrading the CPU for now and instead get the best GPU you can afford (with the view of getting a CPU upgrade sometime in the future). Don't listen to people that talk about bottlenecks - you may lose some (minimal) performance but nothing like the doomsayers like to believe.

That said, the 480GTX isn't a terrible card even now.

Don't bother upgrading to an FX8350 either. Assuming you manage to overclock it incredibly well and hit something near to 5ghz you'll gain pretty much nothing in anything gaming-related. If your overclock is bad and you end up with a similar clock speed to now you'll probably lose performance.

edit: If you are desperate to upgrade your CPU for gaming performance then you'll need to go Intel and get any quad core chip that'll hit 4.5ghz or higher. It would be a lot of money to move for not that much gain though. Don't believe anyone that links you to threads that compare games running at low settings/res...
 
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Thanks again all! I think I'm going to go with a R290 with waterblock and a new monitor to treat myself!
 
If you're under water then get a 8320. They're nearly leveling the £100 mark now and it's a hell of a CPU for £100.

You should get an easy 4.7ghz+ out of it if you're under water.
 
ALXAndy said:
If you're under water then get a 8320. They're nearly leveling the £100 mark now and it's a hell of a CPU for £100.

You should get an easy 4.7ghz+ out of it if you're under water.
Click to expand...

Gaming-wise is that really a massive improvement over a phenom II at almost 4.2ghz? The later AMD processors had much worse IPC and game performance so it took quite a few mhz to reach any kind of parity. I'd be tempted to believe that a 4.7ghz 8320 is better but probably not £100 better.
 
FrenchTart said:
Gaming-wise is that really a massive improvement over a phenom II at almost 4.2ghz? The later AMD processors had much worse IPC and game performance so it took quite a few mhz to reach any kind of parity. I'd be tempted to believe that a 4.7ghz 8320 is better but probably not £100 better.
Click to expand...

The IPC between the two are almost identical, with a few % towards the Phenom. Core for core however PD is much stronger, though not £100 stronger like you said, difference being 2 more usable threads, threads of which for the most part wont be used.

However, in BF4 they will be. Though according to this graph multiplayer the stock 1100t offers minimums that are more than playable, and @4.2Ghz will match the stock 8350.




Edit:
Am i not contradicting myself somewhat? If the core for core performance is 'much' stronger how would a 1100t @4.2Ghz (8350 is 4.0stock) match it? 6 threads vs 8 thread....Or is the 8350 a turbo 4.0 and stock 3.7??
 
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It's swings and roundabouts to which core outperforms the other, entirely dependant on the game/software, instruction sets, how FPU heavy etc.
 
~>Dg<~ said:
my phenom at 3.8 bottle necked my 6970 . so i guarantee it will a card twice nearly 3 times as fast.
Click to expand...

It'll defo bottleneck, but the OP wants to run BF4 @ultra details, something his 480 wont have the grunt to do. If he wants to minimize the bottleneck he'd also need to upgrade the CPU, his [email protected] is pretty much equal to a stock 8350, so spending £140 isn't really worth it (though that's down to the OP)
 
FrenchTart said:
Gaming-wise is that really a massive improvement over a phenom II at almost 4.2ghz? The later AMD processors had much worse IPC and game performance so it took quite a few mhz to reach any kind of parity. I'd be tempted to believe that a 4.7ghz 8320 is better but probably not £100 better.
Click to expand...

In newer gaming with a higher clockspeed it would help IMO yes. However I was more looking at the sort of money OP is spending -

T C said:
Thanks again all! I think I'm going to go with a R290 with waterblock and a new monitor to treat myself!
Click to expand...

And noticing he was under water and figuring that £100 to complete the system overhaul would not be that much in the grand scheme of things. If he's under water there's the chance the PD will do 4.8ghz+ in which case yes, I think it would be a good upgrade for the future any way :) Ed. He most certainly has the board for it :)
 
OP, What speed is your CPU-NB at?

Running it at 3Ghz which should be easily done will provide a nice performance bump too!!

And Phenom 2 x6's are still selling for half decent money second hand so either keep it or cash in on it now and get as much for it as possible.

It could go for anything between £40-70 depending on the day site and time which would reduce the price of moving to the FX.
 
Hi again all.

I'm at work at the moment so will post the CPU-NB when I get home tonight.

Also with the bottleneck, what sort of cpu would you need? I was messing with GFX settings on BF4 last night and I noticed that changing the graphics settings and resolution didn't give that much of a difference though turning off the Anti alaising smoothed things out a bit. Dropping resolution to 720p dropped the frames rates, which I found surprising. So now I'm running 1080p at ultra with no anti aliasing and getting frame rates of 35-60 with fraps (vsynch on) still a bit choppy in places?

So what I've gleaned so far is that with the frame rates not changing when I alter resolution, this indicates a CPU bottleneck? Even though the GFX card is probably been pushed to it's max?

I will try a bit of overclockage and see if I can get the NB up to 3Ghz? It's all fun and games is it not :D

I've been out of overclocking for years, so need to get back into it all and learn the trade all over again.

I'm not denying my cpu is old tech at the moment but if anyone can tell me which cpu (bang for buck) would reduce bottle necks AND be a decent pairing for a R290 that would be fantastic? (There's so many options out there at the moment! So many sockets! So many headaches) :D
 
Tonester0011 said:
Edit:
Am i not contradicting myself somewhat? If the core for core performance is 'much' stronger how would a 1100t @4.2Ghz (8350 is 4.0stock) match it? 6 threads vs 8 thread....Or is the 8350 a turbo 4.0 and stock 3.7??
Click to expand...

:)

The 8350 is about 23% faster clock-for-clock than the 1100T, but about 8% slower clock-for-clock-and-core-for-core (compare the x264 pass 2 benchmark here). I.e. the 8 threads and faster speed make up for the less efficient cores.

So in well threaded games you get a decent boost, as shown in that chart (28-44%). For £100 I'd probably go for it, as long as the motherboard can feed it.
 
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joeyjojo said:
:)

The 8350 is about 23% faster clock-for-clock than the 1100T, but about 8% slower clock-for-clock-and-core-for-core (compare the x264 pass 2 benchmark here). I.e. the 8 threads and faster speed make up for the less efficient cores.

So in well threaded games you get a decent boost, as shown in that chart (28-44%). For £100 I'd probably go for it, as long as the motherboard can feed it.
Click to expand...

Results in encoding tests do not correlate 1:1 with results in gaming. This is the trap that gets people to needlessly upgrade.

The first few posts of this discussion are great:

http://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/11/882963954624881873/

T C - please don't fall into the trap of buying another AMD cpu (to be clear I am not saying that all AMD cpus are rubbish - just that you've already got close to the best performance (in games) that you can get with AMD). You will be throwing money at meaningless benchmarks unless you really care about encoding and the like and not games.

Upgrading to any sandbybridge or better i5/i7 with overclocking capabilities will yield a noticeable improvement but it will also have a much higher price tag.

The cheapest way to get a significant boost is to purchase a new graphics card. In an ideal world you'd upgrade your cpu/mobo too but if that's outside of your budget just go for the graphics card.
 
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