Best Gaming CPUs For The Money: April 2011

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[citation][nom]jdwii[/nom]i will be buying bulldozer when it comes out in june and i'll be getting the quad core. i just hope the reported clocks(http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2011/4/26/amds-fx-bulldozer-cpu-clock-speeds-revealed.aspx) are right then sandy bridge might lose.either way a athlon x4 is real powerful in my pc (with a Amd 6850 OC) i can do video compressing well and i can play crysis 2 max out and i can play GTA4 fine...I'm easily going amd, as there usually best for the money. my prediction about bulldozer is it will be 5-10% slower per/clock and per/core but they will sell more cores then intel and OC them higher(over the SB Competition)and bulldozer will be available to be clock as high or higher then sandy bridge[/citation]

you do realize the sandy bridge lineup is the best perfomance per dollar that i have ever seen? i have been building pc's since 1999, almost exclusively with AMD because they offered the best perfomance per $. Intel has changed their tune at least for the time being and i am reaping the rewards with a p67 system. i was waiting for BD, but who can pass up 2500k for 200$(microcenter) or a 2600k for 170?(my friend works at intel and he got the hook-up, i also got a x-25m 120gb for 120)
 
I have all the parts ready for a new build except the CPU and mobo. I'm leaning heavily toward AM3+, unless eventual benchmarks are a disaster or 900-series chipset boards are overpriced due to the SLI license.
 
AMD needs to have a fire sale on Phenom IIs and release bulldozers soon. Margins are probably thin already on the Athlon IIs and the extra die area of the Phenom IIs probably means that the 955 would be sold at a loss if priced appropriately compared to the i3 2100. Honestly Intel could get away with charging alot more for Sandy Bridge (like 100% more), but I think they just want to put the squeeze on AMD.
 
""I'd take the 950 over the 2400 for three reasons: the 2400 doesn't overclock, which the 950 can, the PCIe capabilities on the 950's platform are far better, and the 950 has 8MB of cache, where the 2400 only has 6MB. (The cache makes a big difference on many games, but has the biggest impact on WoW.)

Note: there is no 2400k. the closest is the 2500k, and that is considerably more expensive.""

The Core i5 2500K is not more expensive. As a matter of fact it's also $180 at Micro Center


 
"you do realize the sandy bridge lineup is the best performance per dollar that i have ever seen? i have been building pc's since 1999, almost exclusively with AMD because they offered the best performance per $. Intel has changed their tune at least for the time being and i am reaping the rewards with a p67 system. i was waiting for BD, but who can pass up 2500k for 200$(microcenter) or a 2600k for 170?(my friend works at intel and he got the hook-up, i also got a x-25m 120gb for 120)"



Intel already rasied the prices a little on the 2500K 25$(I believe the main reason they put prices that low is because of bulldozer) and yes intel has way better offerings right now in the 200$+ market no doubt about that. they need to get working on some good boards that are priced equally to Amd boards(you can find a Usb 3.0+Sata6GB+CFx8x8+ATX not micro+4 ram slots for 90$ with amd) and make them were they does not have to be upgraded or at least the socket for 2 years...do what amd does upgrade chipset not socket's.

I believe the future is more about graphics not processing power in avg person will benefit more from Llano over sandy bridge on a labtop. computers without good graphics lag on everything even with those sandy bridges who sets at there pc all day and uses they cpu intensely I'll say less then 20% of the world. i bet people use graphics more hell even browsers take advantage of it.

note i still believe CPU's are equally important as Gpu's...people need a balance pc not a I7 with integrated graphics (intel graphics) more like a I3,I5 with a mid-range graphics(GTS 450,Radeon 6570)

i have no idea why intel does not care that much about graphics, in sure its because they have no good graphics

and im sure the main reason amd pushing graphics is because they have the fastest in the world while the phenom II x6 is setting at top 30
 
Nice to know my 955 is still alive on the charts 😀 got it when it was fresh, and looks like it won't need to be changed for some time. :)

On the APU theme. I am under the impression that they will sell well. Although Intel CPUs are faster there IGP and there CPU still use separate wafers, not only that theres also a big gap on how well the CPU perform VS IGP.

When considering the market of the new APU which looks like it will be average users with light gaming, and the performance of Intel's chips VS AMD's chips I only see about 10-20% differance, however CPUs today are well able to handle all our needs, and those high clocks are becoming more of an item for braging rights then useful clocks. When you compare graphics power though Intel will always need an add in card to make a well balanced machine, they don't have a reputation for pushing the market unlike both of its competiters (for video cards).

To make matters even more interesting we can take into account GPGPU utilization. In the past this was mostly seen as vapor ware, but with direct compute on Microsoft side, CUDA on Nvidia, and OpenCL for open source projects, and Intel's own media encoding accelerator as examples of where the industry is going we can see interesting things in the future.

If companies continue to utilize the GPU more and more for general processing we can probably predict that intel's gains on its CPU architecture will become less, and less important.

Intel will still have a strong following, and as long as GPGPU usage stays limited they have nothing to worry about. If GPGPU usage takes of though, then Intel will have a problem. As more and more programs use graphic muscle to crunch numbers it will probably become harder for the average person to distinguish between Intel's options and AMD's options. The only thing they will see is price, and how smooth the system reacts.
 
well like allays i say is the depends how much money u have is how u rig gonna be and when the say best for the money there are talking about good price for good speed but some people only for 0.5 GHz more they can spend $200 is the case of my athlon X2 is good one but a want a phenom X6 of course i a big difference and if u want over clocking go for i7 but u know is $300 to $1050
 
For those on a really tight budget, consider AMD/ATI's new Fusion APUs. The current Zacate chip has two CPU and one GPU core on the same chip. You can get the APU, motherboard, and cooling with onboard ATI 8250 series graphics for an incredible $145. No, it probably won't compete with a triple core CPU and traditional PCIx16 ATI video card, but there is nothing to compare with it for the money.
 
TomsHardware. It would be interesting to also nominate the best Price/performance in each category. I've been doing a lot of research lately and found that the best Price/Performance ATM is the Intel Core I5 2400 @ 3.10Ghz. Maybe you could have a meter or a system that gives the value/performance on each recommendation you make. So keep the high-end CPUs in there but let us know the Price/Performance ratio on every recommendation you make. I find myself going to other sites for this kind of information. Anyways, just a suggestion.
 
No love for the Phenom II X4 840? It may be an Athlon in disguise but I'd say it's a better buy than the Athlon II X4 640. At ~$110, I'd pay the extra 10 bucks to get the 200 MHz increase the 840 offers over the 640.
 
[citation][nom]noollig[/nom]No love for the Phenom II X4 840? It may be an Athlon in disguise but I'd say it's a better buy than the Athlon II X4 640. At ~$110, I'd pay the extra 10 bucks to get the 200 MHz increase the 840 offers over the 640.[/citation]

There's no love because at $110 it's too close to the $125 i3-2100, a CPU that meets or beats real high-end Phenom II X4s when it comes to gaming.
 
Just curious about something...

In stores here I see the i3 2100S is the same price as the i3 550, yet
the 2100S can't be oc'd while the 550 will do 4.3GHz with ease. Surely
this makes the 550 a better buy for gaming at that price point? I don't
think mbd or multi-GPU issues are relevant here since someone going
multi-GPU wouldn't buy a budget CPU anyway, and decent mbd prices are
pretty much the same.

Or is the real argument for the 2100S more the better/newer technology
upgrade path? If so, that's not an argument based on gaming performance.
I'd love to know how an oc'd 550 (or even a 540) compares to a 2100S
specifically for gaming, especially since many games don't benefit from
HT, so turning it off would allow a 540/550 to oc even higher.

Ian.

 
[citation][nom]mapesdhs[/nom]Just curious about something...In stores here I see the i3 2100S is the same price as the i3 550, yetthe 2100S can't be oc'd while the 550 will do 4.3GHz with ease. Surelythis makes the 550 a better buy for gaming at that price point? [/citation]

I don't see it that way: consider that the i3 550 would have to be overclocked a lot to reach stock i3-2100 performance.

What can be achieved with the extra invested effort, heat, and power usage other than parity or perhaps a couple extra percent of performance? Doesn't make a lot of sense to choose something that requires more in every category in order to achieve parity.
 
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