hasten :
Who said I'm not going for 5ghz overclock? I do intend on doing that! Actually higher! I am putting it together tonight, replacing my i5 750 that I have had at 4ghz for the last couple years. One of my friends will aqcuire that guy soon.
You basically proved my point that there is value to the FX 4100 in your comparing it to the i3 2100. Anyone with eyes that can read knows that beyond the entry level product there is not much value to the current AMD consumer line up. My original post just stated that there is value in the FX 4100, nothing more. Just because I got an exceptional value doesn't change that fact. You have basically stated that the cheaper FX 4100 is near an i3 2100 in performance (a gap that is decreasing), will meet said performance with a light OC, and costs less up front. Take the fact that AMD motherboards are generally much cheaper than their Intel counter part, add it to the cheaper retail cost of the FX 4100... Even if I applied the same discount to the i3 2100 and h67, the fx4100/970 was still apprx $40 cheaper. I also feel that the 970-UD3 is much nicer than the MSI h67. When building a very low budget computer, $40 is a significant amount.
We'll have to see how Intel's inventory control is after the release of Ivy. We may see the Sandy Bridge CPU's disappear quite quickly once the new processor is released. Especially with amount of time they have delayed Ivy, a good management accountant should be able to forecast inventory levels to move them (Sandy) out of the market to not undercut their own product once Ivy is released...
I'm really not trying to argue with you about this, you seem more knowledgeable about the subject than I am. But from your last post I think that you can see there is value to the FX 4100. I have trouble backing down from a good fight (family of attorneys, although I'm the black sheep CPA).
Ivy i3s will be considerably faster than Sandy i3s. The problem with the AMD systems is that even though they are cheaper, they use a lot more power, especially with an overclock. At 3.6GHz, the FX-4100 uses about 75% more power than a Sandy Bridge i3. At 4.2GHz (be it a 4100 OC or a 4170 at stock, the two are identical except for their clock frequency and the 4170 isn't even binned higher, it's just more expensive to pay for it being pre-overclocked over the 4100), the FX 4100 OC/4170 uses more than 150% more power than the i3s. With Ivy, even overclocked, the FXs won't be as fast for lightly threaded work and they will only be slightly ahead in highly threaded work, but the Ivy Bridge i3s will use about half the power of a 4100 at 3.6GHz and about a third of the power used by the 4100 OC or 4170 to 4.2GHz.
The huge differences in power usage actually make up for the fairly large differences in price with Sandy already over the course of three to four years. The Ivy i3s will make it up all the more faster because they use a lot less power than the already highly efficient Sandy i3s. AMD motherboards usually aren't MUCH cheaper than Intel boards, but are often a little cheaper. As of the last few months, there have been a lot more high quality, cheap Intel boards, so AMD's advantage here has been rapidly shrinking.
The FX-4100 and 4170 don't truly catch up to the i3-2100 and 2120 until they are overclocked to about 4.5GHz so it's not a light overclock that is necessary, but it can be done if you're willing to foot the electricity bill. To be honest, it's not going to cost much more than the i3s until you go over a year and a half or so of usage at more than 6 hours of the machine being on per day even with the FXs overclocked and it will take a lot more time (like I said earlier, more like three or four years) if you don't overclock the 4100, but it will happen and then you're losing more money than you would lose with the Intel system. The costs differences are small enough for it to be a personal preference thing.
I never denied that there is value with the FX-4100, but it's still less than that of the i3s and even further so with the Ivy Bridge i3s coming out. Like I said, it's worth the $110 it's been going for on Newegg lately. I wouldn't buy it because of how energy inefficient it is and it's fairly low performance without an overclock that makes it even less efficient, but I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's a poor value.
Unfortunately, the FX-4100 and 4170 are AMD's best FX gaming CPUs. More cores than four doesn't really matter for any games and a lot of games still don't benefit from more than two cores. Since going above the FX quad core CPUs the only benefit is more cores, the more expensive FX CPUs really don't help gaming much at all. The only CPUs that matter even going above $100 or so for gaming are Intel CPUs. I don't like it, but it's really AMD's fault more than anyone else's. They took a fairly good architecture (Bulldozer) and designed the CPUs with poor methods (computer generated parts that used to be designed and optimized by hand) and then gave it horribly high latency cache and an inefficient memory controller (Intel memory controllers are usually about 30% more efficient with memory bandwidth and that's partly why Intel CPUs don't really benefit from increased memory frequencies; they already have so much more bandwidth than an AMD CPU with the same frequency memory modules).
Also, regardless of the motherboard, 5GHz overclocks on the i5-2500K tend to be short lived because the processor itself oftentimes has problems at clock frequencies that high. Just a head-up for you. The i7-2700K is more built for 5+GHz than the i5-2500K and the i7-2600K, or more accurately, it's better binned. Nonetheless, good luck to you.
( 2100 all out of stock so, hence 2120)
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