AMD AM3+ vs LGA 1156

[bubblegum_bill]

Hi all,

I am planning on building a budget computer as a summer holiday project, and I found a couple of secondhand motherboards on the internet that seemed pretty good. My plan is to work to get the money to pay for parts and accumulate parts as I go (I am a student on a budget ) , starting with the motherboard. I have set aside roughly NZD $90 (around US$65) for a motherboard, trying to get the best I can for the money. I want to play about with overclocking, RAID and all the stuff I haven't managed to be able to do with my Dell i7-5500U laptop

The motherboards I found are an ASUS Intel P7P55 LX, and an ASUS M5A-88V, but I couldn't decide between AM3+ or LGA 1156 as a platform. Is LGA 1156 too obsolete now? SHould I be looking more at LGA 1155 or something newer? A lot of motherboards and CPUs I've seen for later intel processors are a bit pricey for me. The only unlocked intel CPU i could find was the i7-875K which was priced at about US$135 on ebay which is a bit much for me! I have always had intel but would consider AMD (as a lot of their CPUs are unlocked) but I have heard mixed thoughts about them! However, I was looking at the FX 6300 which was a bit cheaper than the i7-875K. is this better than the i7-875K? Is it a good overclocker?

My main uses planned for this thing is photoshop (I'm a design student and sometimes the limits of my laptop's Intel 5500 graphics show!) and a bit of gaming perhaps, but also a real mix of uses. I want to build a computer that I can keep running good for a while, and I want to make sure that my processor won't be a bottleneck. (After a mobo and CPU, I will buy a secondhand graphics card). Overall, I think my budget will be around NZD$400 (roughly USD$280) for the whole setup.

As I live in New Zealand, I need to source parts from somewhere that will ship here
Thanks in advance for anyone's help!

 

[Supernova1138]

Both platforms are obsolete, though LGA 1156 would be moreso as it lacks features like SATA 6Gbps and USB 3.0 support which are available on the AM3+ board. For 1st Generation Core processors you don't need an unlocked multiplier to overclock, so you could buy an i7 860 and overclock it about as well as the 875k, it would just be a bit trickier to do as you'd have to change the BCLK value rather than the multiplier.

In terms of CPU performance, out of those two options you probably would be better off going AM3+ if you could get an 8 core FX CPU, but you may have to flash the BIOS in order to run any of the decent FX CPUs, that board is a very early AM3+ board that only has Bulldozer support out of the box, and you don't want one of those failures.

Frankly, neither option is great and if you're on a really tight budget I would suggest maybe checking ebay for some refurbished Dell or HP office PCs with a Sandy Bridge based CPU eg. i5 2400. You might be able to grab one of those for about the same money as those old motherboards and those old CPUs and you'd get better performance.

 

[bubblegum_bill]

Thank you for your reply! That's a good point about the lack of USB 3.0 / SATA 3, I didn't think about that. I recognise that neither option is going to be a beast of a machine, but my main purpose of the build is to learn along the way, having never done a build before. I was even going to buy an ancient DDR2 LGA 775 board for a home NAS but I decided this wasn't a good idea

With the ASUS M5A-88V evo, how would I go about flashing the BIOS in order to get it to support later FXs? If so, would said later models FXs be fast enough (with or w/o overclocking) to run today's applications? Would it be likely that it wouldn't run heavier applications like photoshop as well as my laptop?

With your comment in mind about the age of this mobo, is it better that I look out for other options? I don't want to spend too much more than this on a mobo as I would like to get a decent(ish) GPU, processor etc. Ebay is a good place for me for sellers that do free shipping worldwide, but since New Zealand is such a long way from anywhere, it is often very expensive to send here, if they send at all. These motherboards I found were from our NZ equivalent of ebay.
Thanks again for your help!

 

[Supernova1138]

Piledriver FX CPUs are still okay CPUs, but they are very hard to recommend to anyone building a new system when they often get outperformed by similarly priced Intel chips when buying new parts. Given your budget, buying new parts isn't really an option for you so they might be more attractive if you can get a good price on a used one.

In order to flash the BIOS you need to have an AM3 or AM3+ CPU that is compatible for the board's existing BIOS, so I would not recommend getting such an old board with an FX 6300 or 83xx unless you have another CPU lying around to do the BIOS update. If you want to go with AM3+, try finding a board with a 970 or 990FX chipset, they're more likely to have the proper BIOS for a Piledriver CPU.

If you can find an LGA1155 motherboard and a Sandy Bridge i5 for a decent price, that would be a better option than the FX CPUs under most workloads, though if you are using a lot of heavily threaded productivity applications an argument could be made for the FX 8320 or 8350, if you can find an AM3+ board with sufficient power phases to handle those chips' high power draw.

 

[bubblegum_bill]

I had heard about FX not being quite up to Intel equivalents, plus I read that they suck up more power, too. Which led me to think Intel is the way to go, but I had a look on Ebay, and most of the LGA 1155 motherboards within my budget (postage included) were only compatible with lower-clocked RAM and only had support for one SATA 3 at most, whereas the M5A-88V has support for up to DDR3 2000 through overclocking and 5 SATA 3 ports, so Asus's website says. How do I find out if it has the power phases required for FX processors? Also, am I right in saying that Sandybridge LGA 1155 processors have support for only DDR3-1333mhz (before overclocking)?

I would have an Intel processor if I could but it seems I might have to spend extra to find a motherboard that has similar connectivity that the M5A-88V has...

Update: I found a Gigabyte GA-P67X-UD3-B3 on trademe (NZ ebay) which looked okay, and the current bidding is at NZD$50 (US$35). Not sure how much it will go for though!

 

[Supernova1138]

The Sandy Bridge Memory Controller defaults to DDR3-1333. Higher speeds are possible using your RAM's XMP profile, though if you get really high speed RAM, eg. DDR3-2133 you might run into problems unless you get an overclockable CPU.

In terms of power phases for AM3+, if you're looking at an 8 core FX, ignore all the 760 and 960 chipset boards along with the lower end 970 boards, they all have weak VRMs that struggle with the 8 core CPUs. Unfortunately spec sheets tend not to be forthcoming for VRMs on motherboards, so a quick and dirty way is to count the little squares that surround the CPU socket. Ideally you want something that has 8 or more of those squares, though 6 could do in a pinch, don't buy anything that has 5 or less. You should also look at a board that has heatsinks in that area, lower end boards with unheatsinked VRMs are going to have problems.

 

[bubblegum_bill]

That makes sense, apologies for my lack of knowledge, most of the stuff I've learned about computer components has been off forums from this website!
Thank you very much for your help. I have decided I will hold off buying the M5A-88V evo and I will bid on the Gigabyte. My plan, if I get the Gigabyte, would be to start with an early i5 and save for a later model, like an i5-3570K or similar. If not, I will hold on for a bit until something else that runs Intel Sandybridge comes along.

 

[bubblegum_bill]

One more question; how many power phases would I need on a motherboard for LGA 1155 to comfortably overclock? From what I can see the Gigabyte GA-P67X-UD3-B3 has 6 phases for the CPU and two for RAM; is this enough for overclocking?

 

[Supernova1138]

That Gigabyte board should be decent for overclocking, Intel's mainstream CPUs use less power than AMD's CPUs so they tend not to need as beefy a VRM setup unless you want to push an extreme overclock with really high end cooling. For Sandy Bridge or newer you do need to have a 'K' SKU processor to overclock eg. 2500k, 2600k, 2700k, 3570k or 3770k, so that's something you need to watch out for when shopping for a CPU, you can't overclock with the non K versions.

 

[bubblegum_bill]

Thanks, I think I'll give that board a go! I didn't think it needed so much oomph as an Intel board but thought i better check!
I assumed it was the case that all Intel Core ix processors (except the 'K' CPUs) had locked multipliers, could the older Core i5/i7 ones have their multipliers changed?

 

[Supernova1138]

The first gen i5s and i7s could be overclocked with the BCLK if they were the non K models. If you had the i5 655k or i7 875k you'd just change the multiplier. Starting with Sandy Bridge Intel linked a lot of motherboard devices to the BCLK value, which meant you couldn't raise the BCLK without causing system instability.

 

[bubblegum_bill]

Oh I see, so the older Intels like the Core 2 Duos had their baseclocks that weren't linked to parts of the motherboard? I read that you would have to have a motherboard with very good Northbridge/Southbridge cooling in order to increase the BCLK by more than a small amount with newer Intel processors, is this the case with AMD processors too? Just curious.

 

[Supernova1138]

I believe it is similar with AMD's current offerings too, though it is somewhat of a moot point as all the FX processors have an unlocked multiplier so you wouldn't need to be messing around with that setting to overclock the CPU. The only processors that AMD sells with a locked multiplier are some of their APUs on the AM1 and FM2+ sockets.

 

[bubblegum_bill]

Update: I bought the Gigabyte GA-P67X-UD3-B3 and I recently purchased an i5-2400 for USD$30 which I think was a bit of a steal. Next up on the component is a decent graphics card!

Thanks again for your help!