AMD vs Intel processing?

[CorneliusFTW]

I am an avid gamer switching from consoles to PC in about 4-5 months. I am still in the building stages of my PC, but the deadline is drawing nearer and nearer for me to make big decisions and start ordering parts. So I ask you, activists of tom's hardware, AMD 8 core processor or an Intel i5 3450 processor? With the AMD, I will spend less meaning I can get a better video card. Please help me out. My budget is about 800 as well.

 

[HEXiT]

800 what? in the uk you can buy a good midrange 2500k setup in the u.s. not so much. spend
200 on the cpu,
100 on the motherboard,
50 on ram,
70 on psu,
50 on case,
90 on hdd
20 on dvd
and what ever you have left on gfx you can always upgrade the gfx down the line so dont worry about em as long as you can play games. in the short term your building a base if the base is strong then what you end up with will be strong.
your base is weak and the pc will crumple. putting a huge gfx card in to a weak machine will just cause bottlenecks so dont bother. buy balance by buying strong basics.

first off forget sli/crossfire. there for systems that cost x2 what you want to spend. get a good basic z77 motherboard that has 1 pci-e x16 slot and a couple of pci expansion ports, 2 ramslots is all thats needed so you can add up to 8 gigs of ram.4 would be better but its something you can sacrifice if your looking to save some scratch.
forget cooling atm. just use the stock cooler for a couple of months it works fine and will allow you to get to know your system and make sure its stable b4 you can overclock it. ram doesnt have to be flashy vengance. tracer ram costs half as much and runs exactly the same speeds and latencies. better to get 8 gig 2x4 for the price of 2x2 i think because the ram runs at 1.35 it doesnt need the huge coolers vengeance has.
hdd get 7200rpm spinpoint f3 its the fastest hdd at 7200rpm and will be better for gaming compared to the 5200rpm
dvd any basic drive will do but if you want it to last get pioneer or sony branded in my experience they are robust. lite-on should be avoided like the plague.
case a coolermaster stom scout can be had for £55-$75 ands is a great starter/budget case.
psu coolermaster xfx/antec and seasonic are the brands to go for... 550w minimum £55-$75 willl be enough to get a quality unit..
add in a 2500k and a gtx 560ti and you have spent 800 ish and got a good mid range build. that can be upgraded with more hdds, ssd's and bigger gfx for the next 5 or more years.

 

[CorneliusFTW]

Best answer selected by CorneliusFTW.

 

[CorneliusFTW]

Found a case with 585w power supply for 50 dollars...I'd say that's pretty good! As for everything else, I'm starting from scratch to see what I can muster up...just a couple more days of work and I'll start ordering parts. Started the build from scratch, gonna see what I can do with this 800 dollars.

 

[gunzrx]

Not sure I 'agree' with the chosen best answer.

Honestly I think that it would be better for you to go on us/can sites and even if you pay shipping the currency flips in your favor.

Start off with a good case, for air there's no better than a raven 3.

http://www.directcanada.com/products/?sku=16950AC0512&vpn=RV03B-WA&manufacture=Silverstone%20Technology

It's 130 but comes with enough fans to start (just trust me).

PSU you want a good one, google for the tiers and try to get as high up as possible. I'd say 600+w just to be future-proof. I'm personally running an ultra 850w in one, and a cm elite 750 w in another almost a year on, and no problems.

For a cooler, grab the hyper 212+ even if you go over budget it's 20 bucks and a lot better than stock amd or intel.

http://www.directcanada.com/products/?sku=11130AC8843&vpn=RR-B10-212P-G1&manufacture=COOLERMASTER

Mother-board, honestly it really depends. From personal experience for over-clocking today you don't 'need' a 150 dollar mobo but don't get a $30 one either.

This all depends on what cpu you want; if you want a 2500k, grab

either one

http://www.directcanada.com/products/?sku=11830BD1817&vpn=GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3&manufacture=GIGABYTE
http://www.directcanada.com/products/?sku=16950BD5990&vpn=GA-Z77-D3H&manufacture=GIGABYTE

AMD, I wouldn't go for an 8-core per se. Depending on your res, just grabbing a 3core phenom 2 and unlocking will be more than enough. They won't run at 4+ghz like the 2500k but if you're on a budget it'll allow more room for the gfx. I have a phenom 2 black edition (forget name) ocd from 2.7ghz 3 core to 3.3ghz 4 core on a asus m5 or m7 something (real cheap), and a 2500k ocd on a gigabyte p67a-ud4-b3 to 4.3ghz.

For ram, now-days just go for the 8gigs that are 1600mhz for 30-40 you're better off having more money in your pocket honestly. If you really want (I just might do this). Grab 16gigs.

So far you're probably at either 250-325 for amd and 350-400 for intel. After this, go anywhere grab an ssd 60-100gb I'd rec. and a regular hdd maybe 2 for raid 0 and 1 more for backup if you want. Refurb. drives work well enough and I'd say you can get all 4 hdds for under 150. Otherwise a 60gb ssd off e-bay or somewhere for 60gb and a nice reg. 7200rpm let's say 500-1tb can be had cheap too.

I've seen places like staples offer 1tb externals for $15. There's deal out there I'd expect that to eat up abou $125.

Now, you have a few hundred left over for a gpu, and extra cooling.

Going with the raven 3, I'd honestly rec. filling up all the remaining slots with fans. It''s cost about 30-40 extra but it's the best aircooling money can buy (atm). That's 11 fans in total, 3 in the case + 1 on the heatsink + all the extra slots.

For gpus, for lower res go with an nvidia. If you have enough grab the gtx 670, or the 7950. 7870 with good cooling to oc it will also do very well.

Triple monitor etc. grab a 7970.

If you want to save money, money though; I've seen almost new gtx 580's for $180 on e-bay and a lot of them are probably under warranty too. So that's a good bet, the 580 depite being a bit old now, will still hold it's own at 1080p on most any game going forward atleast until the new console gen (1-2 years). Don't quote me on that though.

If you want to use all the budget though, I'd rec. atleast the 7950, and going forward it seems that as games use more 64bit math AMD will pull into the lead, since Nvidia cards are only optimized for 32 bit (the new 600 series has 3-4xless 64bit pros. power than even teh 500!).

The post may seem to ramble, but take it more as a guide rather than a strict build. You know how much room, you have; what your needs are (more cpu or gpu games), etc. I'm here to tell you, cpu doesn't matter as much, if you want to 'future-proof' sure blow a couple hundred more on the cpu now, but telling you from experience you'll probably wish you chose a dif. cpu and spent more on graphics a year or two down the line.

Cpus have very good longevity especially when over-clocking comes into the mix. I wouldn't worry too much about it

Either of those would work fine for gaming, but if you really want a 2500k it's 220 on newegg, and probably around the same on directcanada.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103727
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103996

I'd want the top one, but it runs hotter so unless you have a mobo that can handle the wattage skip it. Second one is fine too, clock speed it alright.

Honestly, look at it this way; you're probably spending a good 1-200 more on the intel. Sure it's 'better' now but with a worse gfx card you won't notice. Also, I've noticed AMD supports sockets longer, in a few years anything will be better than what's out now.

You have the option to drop in a brand new proc. into something old with AMD, I doubt that with Intel.

I've build 4 systems so far, two intel, and two amd. All nvidia cards so far 🙂( I know).

A core 2 duo e6600 which was a carry-over from a dell, an athlon x2 black edition (don't recall number),
2500k, and the triple core.

I honestly wish I'd gotten a amd proc. on the 2500k and put a few hundred more to the gfx. The 560 ti I have is showing its age.

Choice is yours,

 

[HEXiT]

op do not buy that psu and case. the psu is likely to be very cheap and if it goes it will likely take the rest of the pc with it... its better to buy a quality unit as you dont want to risk 700+ components to a £/$15 firehazard psu... seriously dont buy it...

as for you gunzrx you best learn to read the ops query. he has 800 to spend. thus my reasoning for budgeting parts to get the most power for the money...its easy to say buy this and buy that when money is no option but he wants a good base system that will accept upgrades... amd may offer similar performance on some games but on others it bottlenecks a lot sooner due to weaker single threaded performance.

you see theres a lot more to this recommending a system than meets the eye... recommend the best balance of power to performance to upgrade-ability to price.
its pointless saying buy this weak cpu and a huge gfx card because your likely to cause bottlenecks on games that dont use all 4 cores. intel has much stronger single threaded performance and wont bottleneck any current card. while any fx and phenom 2 will bottlenck a gtx480 on a game like starcraft 2 http://www.techspot.com/review/305-starcraft2-performance/page13.html both systems use the same gfx but you notice the amd is a lot lower fps due to bottlenecking. because the game only uses 2 threads... so sorry your wrong to advise any amd cpu. especially when he's on a budget.

as for the 560ti showing its age? it will play a lot of games maxed out and them that it doesnt it will play on high but thats not the point. its dirt cheap so stays within his budget, and a great performer for the money so he wont be to put out when he comes to upgrade the gfx which he will likely want to do in 6 or so months when the new nvidia 7xx range appears. getting the 2500k will then be an even smarter choice as it defiantly wont bottleneck on single and dual threaded games like the amd fx do...
your rite in that you wont see much difference in a game like bf3 as both will use the quad core effectivley, but not all games use 4 threads most use 1 or 2 and thats where the differences show in intel parts they have much stronger single threaded performance this is where you see gfx cards bottleneck and this is where amd looses out.

like i say better to buy a strong base that will take the minimum amount of money to upgrade in the future.
than buy a weak base that will choke the next time you upgrade the gfx. which means he would have to upgrade the cpu as well.

 

[alum]

I am an avid gamer switching from consoles to PC in about 4-5 months. I am still in the building stages of my PC, but the deadline is drawing nearer and nearer for me to make big decisions and start ordering parts. So I ask you, activists of tom's hardware, AMD 8 core processor or an Intel i5 3450 processor? With the AMD, I will spend less meaning I can get a better video card. Please help me out. My budget is about 800 as well.

AMD CPU's can offer as much as the Intel CPU's but I think that you should look deeper than the GHz,check the details and see which one will also do better at gaming(since you said you are and avid gamer)

You should also check which one will work better with your other PC components and of course if it is compatible with them
I've both had Intel and AMD CPU's and I was satisfied with both of them