Best Gaming CPUs For The Money: January 2012 (Archive)

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[citation][nom]m32[/nom]AMD CPUs made the list........ arrrrrrrr....... HEART ATTACK!!!!!!Bout time[/citation]
It's called pleasing your advertisers, talk about u-turn. How can you recommend that Athlon over the faster Pentiums when it gets trounced in pretty much every benchmark I have ever seen?
 

They say they have new benchmarks to show why. I'm anxious to see them though, because it is quite a shift.
 
phenom and athlon for under $100, are you kidding me? these havnt been available for well over a year here in Australia. Are you also going to add second hand cpu's and prices to the list? How does anyone find them in stock still? has newegg been hoarding them? I think you should only put cpu's still in production on this list.
 
[citation][nom]ChilledLJ[/nom]How can you recommend that Athlon over the faster Pentiums when it gets trounced in pretty much every benchmark I have ever seen?[/citation]

That's easy. You haven't seen the ones were about to publish.
Simply put, games are using more threads, plus CPU-centric effects like FXAA are shifting the bottlenecks.

[citation][nom]ChilledLJ[/nom]It's called pleasing your advertisers, talk about u-turn. [/citation]

Not sure what that has to do with advertisers. Are you suggesting that there's no objective reason that its possible for games to be taking advantage of more threads the industry moves toward parallelism?

That doesn't seem like a well thought out position.
 
[citation][nom]iam2thecrowe[/nom]phenom and athlon for under $100, are you kidding me? these havnt been available for well over a year here in Australia. Are you also going to add second hand cpu's and prices to the list? How does anyone find them in stock still? has newegg been hoarding them? I think you should only put cpu's still in production on this list.[/citation]

Athlon II and Phenom II has been available at Newegg, Amazon, Tigerdirect, and a few other sites (at least in the USA) ever since they came out. Occasionally, only certain models are available, but there's been at least a few models around since they came out (still, at least in the USA).

[citation][nom]Sakkura[/nom]They say they have new benchmarks to show why. I'm anxious to see them though, because it is quite a shift.[/citation]

Well ,as time goes on, many games get updated and many newer games come out. As things get modernized, they often get multi-threading improvements. Even old decent frequency Athlon II x4s tend to beat out the best SB/IB Pentiums when it comes to software that can make use of all four cores effectively.

[citation][nom]Sakkura[/nom]I thought that was just an outlier. Like when the FX 8350 outpaced everything Intel offers in Medal of Honor: Warfighter.[/citation]

Hyper-Threading on the i3s tends to be much more effective than on the i7s and old Pentium 4s because current software often scales effectively on the i3s to make decent use out of it. The i7s have too many threads with Hyper-Threading for even most modern games and back in the day with P4, most games were single threaded, Hyper-Threading was not a mature technology, and older versions of Windows didn't have very good support for it, if any at all. There are still many games where Hyper-Threading doesn't even help the current i3s, but there are many more where it can and does matter and current operating systems support it properly.
 
[citation][nom]iam2thecrowe[/nom] these havnt been available for well over a year here in Australia.[/citation]

Read the first page, please. The list is North America-centric, and these processors are still available here. Use your discretion in other areas in conjunction with the hierarchy chart in that case.
 

I went to a local price comparison site and found the Athlon II x4 640 at 15 different etailers in _Denmark_, and the Phenom II x4 965 at 20 different etailers. That means practically all the dingy little stores in one tiny little country managed to stock these things.
 


Not a huge shift, really. The hyperthreaded Core i3's still beat out AMD's best, but the margins are much lower. It's the dual core Pentiums that took a real hit. Of course, they're still better than Athlon II and Phenom II X2s, but we're just saying stay away from all 2 core/2 thread CPUs for a bit of futureproof-ness if you're building a rig.



I don't know. Even in our last sub-$200 CPU gaming comparo, the hyperthreaded i3s did much better than the pentiums.

I think once you hit quad-core i5's hyperthreading becomes ineffective, but for dual-core Intel chips it's helped for a long time.
 


All sorted!
 
How is it possible any Athlon II ranks higher then the FX 4100 and the fx 6100. both of the FX chips have higher clock rates and 8mb of L3 cache. The Athlon II does not even have L3 cache.
 
The Athlon II X4 640 and Phenom II X4 965 have been put down as 40nm and not 45. Minor point. :)

stevelvl - the 4300 should realistically banish any recommendation for the 4100 and 6100, even with its hobbled L3 cache.
 
[citation][nom]edlivian[/nom]no love for the i7-3770k, I got mine from microcenter for $209, amazing deal.[/citation]
Sad face, thats how much I paid for my 3570k

Its nice to see AMD bumped up a tier to where I think they perform in gaming (compared to December's list)
 
[citation][nom]stevelvl[/nom]How is it possible any Athlon II ranks higher then the FX 4100 and the fx 6100. both of the FX chips have higher clock rates and 8mb of L3 cache. The Athlon II does not even have L3 cache.[/citation]

Pricing and actual performance. Remember, L3 cache is not everything; CPUs are very complex and have many different factors in performance even not counting drivers, instruction sets, operating systems, programs, and more. L3 is just one of many factors. For example, the FX-4100 has a multi-threading bottle-neck due to its modular architecture being flawed (AMD's modules in Bulldozer and Piledriver were not designed to handle the full throughput that the cores are capable of) and many other issues, only some of which are shared with the fairly different Family 10h architecture implementation used in Athlon II. As for the FX-6100, it has the same issues as the FX-4100, but even lower clock frequencies and its additional module doesn't always make up for those lower frequencies.
 


Ding! Ding! Ding!

Though, AMD has been doing 40nm since the HD4770s, and the APU *SIMD Engines* on Trinity and Richlands are 40nm Turks.


 


Trinity does not have a Turks GPU and the GPU in Trinity is 32nm. Richlands is not Turks either and I'm willing to bet that it's not 40nm even without checking.
 
[citation][nom]Sakkura[/nom]Woah, what? I can't wait to see that benchmark data now! 'Hyperthreading = useless for gaming' has been the mantra for years and years, this could really shake things up.[/citation]
As I understand, if Windows is not assigning threads correctly, then HT can be a problem. Similar to AMD module problem, when windows assigns two threads to two cores in a single module, while other modules stay idle.. If you assign two threads to intels first core and its HT virtual core, rather than two separate cores, it creates a problem. But in i3, all four threads are usually ocupied in games. When a game will benefit from more than 4 cores, then i7 will be faster in games thanks to HT. Until then i5 is a better choice
 
[citation][nom]fourzeronine[/nom]toms is really dumb. its 4 cores. windows lists as 2 cores 4 threads so that is properly scheduled u nubs.[/citation]

While I agree with your point on the CPU, I can't give a thumbs up for it given how much of an ass you were about it.
 
So when are we going to see something that represents a generational shift at the highend? There are currently THIRTY CPU's in the top performance tier. The Sandy bridge CPU's just crossed their 2 year anniversary (1/9/2011) and they are still in the top tier. Are we ever going to see a CPU that necessitates a higher tier? Obviously with 30 CPU's, there has to be some significant general performance differences between the slowest and the fastest. So is the reason these CPU's are all clumped together a software problem and not a hardware one?
 
[citation][nom]Sakkura[/nom]Woah, what? I can't wait to see that benchmark data now! 'Hyperthreading = useless for gaming' has been the mantra for years and years, this could really shake things up.[/citation]

My take on this is that more than four threads is generally useless for gaming. As such a Pentium w/ 2C/2T < i3 w/ 2C/4T, but an i5 w/ 4C/4T ~= i7 w/ 4C/8T (in terms of gaming).

It's not the hyperthreading itself, it's the number of threads.

+1 to a new page per column and not reusing the old ones BTW.
 
[citation][nom]antiglobal[/nom]No, it has 4 physical cores. And I don't use globalist Microsoft's products, I use Linux. Ubuntu, to be precise. And Linux sees and uses all 4 cores.[/citation]

If I was to hazard a guess, I'd say that MS had it recognized as a dual core with four threads to piggyback on some of the Hyper-Threading optimizations instead of remaking the wheel for AMD's modular architecture's bottle-neck with using both cores of a module extensively. I agree, it's a quad core CPU, but it was probably easier to let Windows treat it as a dual-core with two threads per core than add more bloat to Windows to optimize for it. Linux, AFAIK, has a more advanced scheduler and such and was had support to some extent for AMD's modular architecture's bottle-neck, so that's probably why it didn't get a similar trick done.
 
While AMD is naming and selling their products after number of integer cores, I observed some different naming in some of their documentation, for FX4xxx it stated 4 integer clusters / 2 cores (rather than 2 modules).
 
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