Best CPU for Radeon R9 270X

[cyruseternity]

Hi guys...i want to assemble a gaming rig...to play games on a 720p monitor.....so my question is that what will be the best cpu for r9 270x....also will i be able to max out on games like fifa.. Pes...bf4...on a 720p monitor...

 

[mdocod]

Don't take this the wrong way, but you are asking a question from a position of ignorance. The CPU should be matched to the compute performance required to achieve the FPS you want to play at, not to the GPU.

Ironically, MOST "hardware enthusiasts" like to play the witch doctor and entertain that there is a mystical relationship between the CPU and GPU that can be satisfied if you can just get the right CPU with the right GPU. Even the folks you would ordinarily place your trust in for information on this subject will tend to entertain this false mysticism (I've caught many writers for online review sites like Tom's, including here at Tom's, making this error).

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If your goal is 30+FPS with ultra detail settings and lots of post processing and all the effects cranked to the max, then a 270X will do well to achieve that, and so will an Athlon X4 860K or i3 or Pentium in 99% of games and conditions.

If your goal is to adjust visual quality to play at 60FPS (v-sync) and try to maintain that all the time, then again, the 270X can do this just fine, especially at just 720P, but perhaps not with every last visual quality setting always cranked to the max (will depend on the specific game). You will however need a stronger CPU to ensure that compute intensive (congested) conditions don't bog things down below your goal frame rate. An i5 haswell is generally preferred for this.

Doesn't matter if you're using an R7 250X, R9 270 or R9 290, if you want to configure your balance of visual quality to achieve 60FPS with any of these GPUs (yes they can all play games at 60FPS), then you'll need a solid CPU like an i5 haswell for any of these configurations to meet that FPS goal across the widest possible range of conditions/games.

 

[cyruseternity]

Hmm...ok....actually im a bit confused between fx8350 and i5 4440...just cant decide which way to go..

 

[mdocod]

The FX-8350 technically has about 33% more raw execution capability when all 8 cores are saturated than the i5-4440, meanwhile a core of the i5-4440 is about 35% faster than a PileDriver core.

If you were picking a CPU for a productivity application that could scale into 8 cores as easily as it could scale into 4, then the FX-8350 would be a solid contender in it's price class. Unfortunately, real-time workloads like gaming scale proportionally into core performance, not into core count (performance scaling into core count tapers downward with more and more cores, some game engines and GPU driver/API implementations scale better than others into many-cores). Overall, in most games, the i5-4440 is actually the stronger CPU.

If you want to make things more complicated, we can bring into consideration the driver/API compute overhead. AMD's driver and associated compute overhead in DX11 games, is, ironically, better suited to the i5 than to it's own FX series CPUs, as it is poorly threaded and will also scale better on haswells raw per-core performance. Until Mantle shows more maturity it's probably still smartest to buy based on DX11 performance characteristics.