AMD FX-4170 Vs. Intel Core i3-3220: Which ~$125 CPU Should You Buy?

[blazorthon]

AMD needs to switch its cpu lineup to TSMC for production and dump GF. It is the manufacturing process that is keeping these cpus hotter than hell. SOI just sucks and there is a reason why Intel never adopted it.

GF has improved greatly. Look at Trinity, which is manufactured by GF IIRC. Trinity is excellent.

Furthermore, SOI is superior to bulk and whether or not AMD is using SOI isn't limited to GF, especially considering that TSMC has been working on an SOI process from what I've read. AMD's problems are purely from their designs. Intel didn't adopt SOI because it is more expensive than bulk IIRC and would have been far mroe expensive to adopt it after they were already using bulk (transitioning like that would have probably been worse than a die shrink and those are already expensive enough).

 

[cleeve]

I think in this price segment, you would be looking at a Trinity APU over either of these.

I'll disagree strongly on that one, Falchard.

Trinity makes little sense in the price range if you're considering a discrete graphics. I wouldn't buy an A10-5800K to pair with a $170 Radeon HD 7850 1GB. But with an i3 or FX-4000 that's a very viable budget build.

FX cache will help with games, probably more than Trinity's advancements. There's more of a case to wait for Vishera than to use Trinity in this case.

 

[de5_Roy]

What in the world are you talking about?

he's talking about 'amd dual graphics' aka asymetric crossfiring of the igpu (e.g. 7660d) inside trinity with a discreet card like radeon hd 6450/6570/6670. he has also conveniently left out microstuttering occuring from cfx'ing two low end gpus, amd's driver support, catalyst profiles, only dx 10 and 11 and lack of dx 9 support, weakness of desktop trinity as a gaming cpu with a discreet card and lastly, lack of relevance to the article.
dual gfx only matters if you're really, really, really strapped for cash, can only afford a 6670 or less and have slow enough perception that the microstuttering doesn't bother the user.

 

[proffet]

[citation][nom]jerm1027[/nom]At $125, they should have included the FX-6100. That's $120 on Newegg, plus an additional $15 off on sale.[/citation]
that's the worse Bulldozer chip of them all...

[citation][nom]Soma42[/nom]Nothing too surprising I suppose. AMD is looking to cut 20% of it's workforce and I think I know why. Performance is hit or miss and at twice the power of Intel's offerings. Intel is getting close to competing with ARM with their mainstream lineup and AMD's dual module is still at 125W. What's wrong here?Hope Piledriver is all that it promises and more.[/citation]
love where your head is at...
+1

It makes a heck of a lot of sense when you're benchmarking to look for a bottleneck. It makes a lot of sense when you're looking for the CPUs limitations. Why assume the 7970 is too much for a $120 CPU? A few years ago this was not the case, and anything more than a $150 CPU was a total waste on games.

From a real-world perspective, absolutely. I totally agree that benchmarks like this that show us sub-$170 CPUs aren't best suited for high-end graphics. Having said that its still useful info for folks who might plan to upgrade their graphics card before their CPU, and then swap out their CPU later.

Unfortunately, the current generation of Zambezi FX chips have no gaming upgrade path, FX-4170 is as fast as it gets and the 8150 is actually slower at stock clocks. We'll see if Vishera can help with that.
On the other hand, socket 1155 has a beautiful upgrade path.

+1

would have been nice to see the A10-5800K in there too, as we know its also fairly competitive with the i3-3220.

me too..

 

[proffet]

You can probably take it down by around that much with undervolting. From what I've read, Piledriver will reduce power consumption in addition to providing a performance boost, not keep power consumption the same. They might keep some of the same TDPs, but that doesn't mean that power consumption won't come down. Either way, we'll find out soon enough.

Even ONE of these GPU's blows away Intel's best offering... but you get TWO of these GPU's crossfired for much less than the price of an Intel setup, so the choice is clear - go with AMD.

What I'd like to see is redoing this sort of article after disabling two cores in the FX. If they don't matter much for gaming, then they are just wasting power that doesn't need to be consumed.

For simplicity's sake, you could use thread affinity controls in the shortcuts to tell them to only use core 0 and core 3 or core 0 and core 1 (depending on how you want to do it). It wouldn't bring power consumption all the way down to the i3, but it would help at load with these games.

For the more advanced user, one could use PSCheck or a similar program to it in addition to thread affinity so that both well-threaded and lightly-threaded workloads could be optimized for. Sure, none of this is stuff for the average user, but really, how many of us are average users here at Tom's?

Regardless, it's still a very good article. Thanks, Tom's

1.) still will be a way higher power consumption that Intel's offerings, all of them.

2.) who wants to do all that, not the average consumer / gamer.
that's just too much when you can get an Intel chip in this case (2C/4T) that even outside gaming runs with the FX-41710
and AMD's nonsense module/cores nonsense.

 

[yobobjm]

Doesn't seem like a bad processor the 4170, this gives me very high hopes for the 4350 or whatever the up and coming quad core amd is.

 

[proffet]

Doesn't seem like a bad processor the 4170, this gives me very high hopes for the 4350 or whatever the up and coming quad core amd is.

look again.. 😉

 

[jacobdrj]

[citation][nom]Cleeve[/nom]That's easy. The article caters to any build where the user has $120 to spend on a CPU.You're missing more options, too: general purpose desktop, workstation, etc. There are more PC applications than just HTPCs and gaming machines.[/citation]
All the segments you mentioned would be served better with different CPUs. Many of them less expensive than these.
SB Pentiums. IB Pentiums. Both better choices. The 3225 is ALSO 120 dollars. Trinity chips. Still, better serving these segments. I don't understand what market segment these chips intend to fill when there are better less expensive options, and with a little more cash (like maybe $20) you get FAR better chips...

There is no such thing as a bad product, only a bad price, remember?

 

[jaquith]

You missed the point of the question. The context is, why assume it's useless unless we keep testing them? I'm not for sticking to previously formed notions without challening them regularly. That's how assumptions evolve. If we just assume everything we know will never change, we'd never have found out that new CPUs *can* make a difference in games, because they didn't make a difference a few years ago... so we'd never have tested them again. 😉

Also, as I mentioned, the data is quite useful info for folks who are planning an upgrade path. Nice to see what a Core i5 can get you from a Core i3.

Ahh, my bad. However, if all I knew was your Picking A Sub-$200 Gaming CPU article with the AMD FX-4100 then the AMD FX-4170 doesn't take too much imagination to be presumptive.

For me the fear is a monopoly. Years ago, when Intel had no competition, CPU prices were ludicrous. Low-end processors were $300.

I'm not that concerned with AMD's high end stuff being able to run against Intel's high end stuff. I don't even think that's a serious hope at this point, Intel's lead is just too far.

If AMD can bring power usage down though, and can make a good price/performance budget alternative under $200, that's fantastic in my books. I think that's a reasonable hope.

But if they get smothered out completely... don't want to think about the consequences. healthy competition is important in any market.

Hey I've always felt the same, and there is no 'good' answer if AMD gets bought out. So in that case it's all about 'who' purchases AMD. If I were running the show I'd skip a generation, deal with the low yields and bet the farm as a last ditch effort to compete. I'm a risk taker especially when facing the alternative.

All Intel has to do is to sell their CPU under cost to put AMD out of business, and poof that's all she wrote. If I were running Intel that's exactly what I'd do - short term loss vs long term gains and they've got the cash to burn.

Yep it's cut throat, but life's not fair nor is a for profit business a charity.

 

[husker]

[citation][nom]blazorthon[/nom]It can be worse than that and regardless, about $1.5 a month is about $50-60 over a three year period in which case you might as well have gotten the i5. Undervolting could also be considered and would probably lessen the power consumption loss that AMD had (although probably not nearly as much as core configuration ad/or thread affinity modification, especially altogether) as well as other factors, so its hardly a total comparison for enthusiasts anyway.[/citation]

Don't forget to add the cost of more expensive motherboard and memory in order to use that intel chip. Whoops, there goes the savings.

 

[proffet]

Don't forget to add the cost of more expensive motherboard and memory in order to use that intel chip. Whoops, there goes the savings.

depends on what motherboard and quality/features just like AMD motherboards...
whoops, there goes your argument..
😛

 

[qbsinfo]

Don't forget to add the cost of more expensive motherboard and memory in order to use that intel chip. Whoops, there goes the savings.

where are you shopping?

let me help you with that:
http://pcpartpicker.com/parts/motherboard/#sort=a6

 

[cleeve]

Don't forget to add the cost of more expensive motherboard and memory in order to use that intel chip. Whoops, there goes the savings.

There are some low cost Intel boards now.

As for memory, that's interchangeable between AMD and Intel, so no difference there.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]husker[/nom]Don't forget to add the cost of more expensive motherboard and memory in order to use that intel chip. Whoops, there goes the savings.[/citation]

[citation][nom]proffet[/nom]depends on what motherboard and quality/features just like AMD motherboards...whoops, there goes your argument..[/citation]

For the most part, I have to agree with proffet on this one. If you want a bunch of SATA6 ports at a low price, then AMD boards win, but otherwise, they generally aren't too much better in pricing. if at all. Also, Intel is much more efficient in getting more bandwidth per theoretical memory performance than AMD, so the memory argument is completely false.

 

[silverblue]

If you're going for bleeding edge Intel I'd agree - quad channel setups are very pricey. APUs benefit from faster memory in a way that Intel setups generally don't, but with a dual channel kit, the price difference between slow and fast is relatively small. Amusingly, back in the P4 days it was Intel that really made use of the added bandwidth - the Athlon 64 gained far less performance from the move to DDR2, for example.

Bulldozer was supposed to have a B3 stepping landing Q1 but I guess they figured that it wasn't worth it (and fixed very little).

I suppose you could test your favourite software via the Set Affinity... option under the Task Manager, then add the same affinity settings to the command line if it works out well, much like the Mask 55/Mask AA articles floating about. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

I'm very interested in seeing these new Athlon IIs (*sigh* AMD - naming conventions?) and how much power they use in comparison to the 4170.

 

[nikaan]

Why did n`t you use Photoshop CS 6 instead of CS 5 ?

Because it`s more multi-threaded...

 

[gilahacker]

And when AMD comes out with a newer/better chip at the same price point, Intel will simply drop the prices on their existing chips and keep putting the hurt on AMD.

I've always used Intel chips, but I would have liked to have seen AMD really succeed. We *need* competition.

 

[Novulux]

The A10-5700 has been available in OEM PCs like HP for months now (June or July). Someone should take one out and do a review. :O

 

[lyncer777]

I create an account here just to cheer you AMD cmon! don't F@%nG GIVE UP!

 

[ipwn3r456]

AMD is finally kicking some asses back. Keep it going AMD! Might be getting one of your products in the future!

 

[tigeryeow]

if piledriver has the improvements they say i would get thee fx 8 cores

 

[ddpruitt]

$125 cpus with a $400 graphics card.

Explain to me how the game benchmarks are in any way meaningful. The gaming benchmarks should have used something nearer the budget of these cpus, a 7850 at most. The application benchmarks are far more telling here. And honestly it looks like the two CPUs are evenly matched in that arena.

 

[blazorthon]

[citation][nom]ddpruitt[/nom]$125 cpus with a $400 graphics card.Explain to me how the game benchmarks are in any way meaningful. The gaming benchmarks should have used something nearer the budget of these cpus, a 7850 at most. The application benchmarks are far more telling here. And honestly it looks like the two CPUs are evenly matched in that arena.[/citation]

It's used to show where the bottle-necks are. If the point is to find out which is the better gaming CPU, then you're not looking for which will give adequate performance with a lower end card, you're looking for what will handle the best graphics. If you want to know if each CPU is adequate for current graphics cards around the budget you'd expect to spend on graphics with such CPUs, then that's a whole other story.

That the FX-4170 and the i3-3220 were more or less neck and neck throughout this shows that even with a very high end graphics card, the FX has game for its price, albeit its power consumption in stock configuration is undeniably too high.

 

[cleeve]

$125 cpus with a $400 graphics card.

Explain to me how the game benchmarks are in any way meaningful.

Already answered, 5th post down on Page 3 of the posts... 😉

 

[abitoms]

Already answered, 5th post down on Page 3 of the posts... 😉

(OT)
This is the beauty of Toms' commentary system. Once you comment, the page number of your comment stays the same.
This is good.

The Page-selector-dropdown in the reviews on the other hand......