~150 Dollar CPU/Motherboard Combo?

[ludus]

Hello, I am going to be making a gaming pc soon, all I need now is the cpu and mobo. It is in fact a budget build and will be used for 1080p gaming. I hope to buy the cpu/mobo as soon as possible. And if I can, I would like the cap to be $150, but preferably under that. Previously, I was looking at the AMD FX-6300 and Msi 970A-G46 cpu/mobo combo at microcenter for $139.98, but that has been out of stock for a while at Cambride and I don't know if Msi is reliable. So it all comes down to the final question.

What is the best CPU/Motherboard combo I can get for ~$150 or less, amd or intel, I don't care?

My Build
Microcenter

UPDATE: I should probably add that I will be upgrading in the future, I have planned to eventually add a ssd, 8 more gb or RAM, and a second 660.

 

[ludus]

and any Z87 motherboard from Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, Biostar, or ASRock will be fine.

Yes but which one is the best?

 

[CTurbo]

Ok seriously if you are close to a microcenter then you must go Intel. They have awesome prices on i5s and i7s. If overclocking and SLI are important to you, then you REALLY need to make sure you get a very good motherboard and psu now. You already purchased the XFX 550w 80+ psu? It will be fine for a single GTX660, but it will not be enough for two in SLI. Especially if you have a FX 8320 which is a power hog. You will probably want at least 600-650w for SLI and overclocking.

Anyway, I'm out of time now, but a little later tonight I will look through some Z87 boards for you.

 

[ludus]

Ok seriously if you are close to a microcenter then you must go Intel. They have awesome prices on i5s and i7s. If overclocking and SLI are important to you, then you REALLY need to make sure you get a very good motherboard and psu now. You already purchased the XFX 550w 80+ psu? It will be fine for a single GTX660, but it will not be enough for two in SLI. Especially if you have a FX 8320 which is a power hog. You will probably want at least 600-650w for SLI and overclocking.

Anyway, I'm out of time now, but a little later tonight I will look through some Z87 boards for you.

Yea, I have a Microcenter pretty darn close to me. If you really believe so, then I'll go Intel. I was sort of leading that way, because I really want to upgrade to an intel i7 4770k. I don't know if it will happen again, but at around Christmas last year, they sold it for around $100. So that would be epic! If you could look up a mobo for me, that would be awesome! Thanks for all your help btw.

 

[ElMoIsEviL]

The Pentium g3220 @ 3.0ghz is equal to the FX 9590 @ 5.0ghz in single core performance.

Irrelevant no? How well a CPU performs in a Single Core task won't tell you how well it will perform in a Multicore scenario. The reverse is also true. If we're talking games, and we are, then aside from a few examples (say Skyrim, Borderlands 2 or other poorly programmed titles)... Single core performance isn't the deciding factor.

In overall gaming it will trade blows with a FX 41xx.

That may be true but why would that matter? You said it yourself, the FX-41xx is crap (and it is). Why would he avert getting one piece of crap in order to instead obtain another piece of crap? Obviously the use of the term "piece of crap" is entirely subjective here.

The FX 6300 trades blows with a Haswell i3 in gaming. The AMDs also use 2-3 times the power and put off 2-3 times the heat too, and that's at stock speeds. Overclock and you've just doubled that easily.

I'm not sure why the FX-6300 is being mentioned alongside a Haswell i3 for gaming. You're still thinking in terms of 2012/2013. This year... things won't be so clear cut. You're talking to a guy who will be investing money, he barely has, in a system to last him, I would assume, a set amount of time (3-4 years I would guess). You have to think ahead. You have to factor in Mantle, OpenCL as well as Multi-core in general. Mantle has the ear of around 10 developers right now (over 25 titles). Heck Crytek is beta testing Mantle as we speak. Shouldn't you factor that in given the API comes out Jan/Feb this year?

As for the power usage... irrelevant imo since it doesn't even make a large difference energy cost wise.

The best thing about buying a Pentium for $50 now is that you could sell it for $35-40 when you're ready to upgrade. Plus there are slightly beefier Pentiums for just a little more money like the 3.2ghz g3420 and 3.3ghz g3430.

I disagree. Best thing is to purchase a CPU with a decent assortment of Cores. An i5 or AMD FX 63xx should be the bare minimum for a 2014 gaming rig imo. The AMD FX-6300 will likely perform quite closely to the i5 (in Mantle titles anyway). I say this because heavily threaded games (such as the DirectX version of Battlefield 4) already highlight this truth:

Honestly, I don't care about Intel vs. AMD or any of the hoopla people pull over which manufacturer is better. As it stands right now... Intel do have the more powerful CPUs (brute force wise). There is no denying that. But once you add parallelism to the mix... the difference just seems to melt away.

2014 is the year of Parallelism, the year of Openness and Transparency. The year of Open Source, OpenCL, Mantle, SteamOS and Linux/Android in general.

The Windows/CUDA/PhysX/Emphasis on IPC days may very well be numbered.

I hate to sound rude but, this is all well and good, but it doesn't provide me with an answer. Should I go with AMD FX 4130 and an Asus M5A99FX PRO R2.0 or with the Intel Pentium G3220 with one of the boards from above? And, this is slightly confusing me, are you saying that AMD might blow Intel out of the water, or that it shouldn't be counted out yet? And also, what is this information's relevance to me, because it's a lot of info. to take in.

Btw, once again heres the list of the choice of motherboards to possibly go with the Intel Pentium G3220:

Asus
Msi
Msi
Gigabyte

What I'm showing you is the importance of Cores in upcoming titles throughout 2014. So yes AMD will be performing better than previously throughout 2014 in terms of gaming performance (as more titles adopt AMD Mantle as well as place a greater emphasis on multi-threading (such as Battlefield 4 DirectX). This is what the graph shows (core scaling).

So what I'm saying is that there is really no reason to get that Intel Pentium chip only to upgrade later. For one, you will be wasting money. For two, you will have a hard enough time selling that chip after. You're better off getting a decent CPU followed by a motherboard (or vice versa).

For $150 I would get an AMD FX-6300. Later on I'd get a decent AM3+ board. Perhaps something like the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 (amazing board). It handles both SLI and Crossfire. Here's the board.

 

[CTurbo]

ASRock - http://pcpartpicker.com/part/asrock-motherboard-z87extreme4
MSI - http://pcpartpicker.com/part/msi-motherboard-z87g45gaming
BIOSTAR - http://pcpartpicker.com/part/biostar-motherboard-hifiz87x3d
Asus - http://pcpartpicker.com/part/asus-motherboard-z87a
Gigabyte - http://pcpartpicker.com/part/gigabyte-motherboard-gaz87xud3h

So these are the best motherboards for you in your price range by each brand. I am not a brand snob. I would get which ever one of these is cheaper at the time. You seriously can't go wrong with any of these. The last 3 builds I did used Gigabyte, MSI, and Asus and they have all been great.