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

[1991ATServerTower]

I don't think it's "nit-picky" for we hardware geeks to expect Tom's Hardware to not make mistakes like the Pentium thing Beninchi mention and the FX-4130 error many have mentioned. This is a hardware enthusiast web site, not Best Buy... Nothing like going into a store and having to answer every question on your own, because you know way more than anyone employed in the store...

 

[InvalidError]

"The only real news bit is that the 3.3 GHz Pentium G3220 is Intel's fastest Pentium ever, breaking the record set by its Wolfdale-based Pentium E6700 at 3.2 GHz."

This is false. The Pentium E6800 (which I own) is 3.33 GHz.

You are only looking at clock speeds. In terms of net performance, the G3220 should be about twice as fast as the E6800 due to Haswell's higher IPC and memory bandwidth, which does make it the fastest Pentium ever.

 

[Someone Somewhere]

Then what about the 3.3GHz Ivy G2140? The E6700 would have been thoroughly beaten by that.

 

[logainofhades]

"The only real news bit is that the 3.3 GHz Pentium G3220 is Intel's fastest Pentium ever, breaking the record set by its Wolfdale-based Pentium E6700 at 3.2 GHz."

This is false. The Pentium E6800 (which I own) is 3.33 GHz.

You are only looking at clock speeds. In terms of net performance, the G3220 should be about twice as fast as the E6800 due to Haswell's higher IPC and memory bandwidth, which does make it the fastest Pentium ever.

That statement in the article purely implies that we are talking about clock speed here. This article has a few errors in it and this is just another one. Though it is still not as bad as calling a 4170 a Vishera part.

 

[daswilhelm]

"The only real news bit is that the 3.3 GHz Pentium G3220 is Intel's fastest Pentium ever, breaking the record set by its Wolfdale-based Pentium E6700 at 3.2 GHz."

This is false. The Pentium E6800 (which I own) is 3.33 GHz.

You are only looking at clock speeds. In terms of net performance, the G3220 should be about twice as fast as the E6800 due to Haswell's higher IPC and memory bandwidth, which does make it the fastest Pentium ever.

they are just talking about clock speed

 

[SessouXFX]

AMD's biggest problem goes back to their single thread issues from their phenom years and the fact most developers don't see the need to push multi-threaded performance for those programs that can be done easier the old fashion way, ie: Video Games. It's not the sites that review the AMD chips being paid off, it's that AMD went outside the box a bit too soon for their own good, without first improving their single threaded performance going towards these FX chips. An even bigger gaffe goes to the fact, they changed up so much during the development of the FX chips. Those Piledriver chips may work, but let's be real here, the thermal performance of those chips are god awful (the Piledrivers). And they don't even touch the lower end Intel chips during the same time frame.

But if you're a fan of AMD like I am, you know better than to think that AMD can directly compete with Intel and their war chest. Intel wasn't sued on multiple occasions for no reason. That War Chest of theirs was bourne from cheating to get ahead. And there's not a single Intel fan that can say otherwise. There's a lot of proof out there that Intel played a dirty game early on to get to where they are now. It remains relevant today, because Intel took that money and put it to good use, to get over the top while AMD was still cruising along. What we're seeing right now was the results from that time frame.

But even with that said, you can't point a finger at Intel forever. AMD needs to do their part in pushing forward with new innovations and improving the performance of their chips. They knew that much when they created the FX architecture while leaving the Phenom Thubans in the first place. The current top end of AMD is Intel's middle ground in that regard. On this list, it's not out of order because somebody is hating on AMD. It's because AMD didn't release a processor that was on par with Intel. Intel did the right thing and steadily improved their single thread performance. I'm hoping AMD has woken up to the reality that having more threads doesn't mean anything if the processor can't even utilize single thread performance at a high level. If AMD does better in that area, Intel will be forced to cut theri prices, and Intel fans will rejoice.

Personally, I could care less if they rejoice or not, and truth told, I really have no dog in the fight. I just want good, affordable performance out of my PC for gaming. And while I do like AMD and hope they do better the next time around, i'm staring at the 4820k for my next build. Once the bios updates come, it should be better than the 4770k. A matter of time before we know.

 

[bigcyco1]

I don't think it's "nit-picky" for we hardware geeks to expect Tom's Hardware to not make mistakes like the Pentium thing Beninchi mention and the FX-4130 error many have mentioned. This is a hardware enthusiast web site, not Best Buy... Nothing like going into a store and having to answer every question on your own, because you know way more than anyone employed in the store...

You are right. But, even so everybody makes mistakes, nobody is perfect. I am sure the errors will be corrected.

 

[logainofhades]

Well, calling a Bulldozer chip a Vishera chip has been done 2 months in a row. One month wrong and fixing it for the 2nd month I could understand, 2 months in a row with the same error.

 

[pauldh]

Oops. Don's probably too busy to track this monstrosity of comment accumulation, and being revised monthly the same block of text just slipped through edits again. You guys are absolutely correct, I'll forward this to his attention. Thanks.

 

[logainofhades]

Oops. Don's probably too busy to track this monstrosity of comment accumulation, and being revised monthly the same block of text just slipped through edits again. You guys are absolutely correct, I'll forward this to his attention. Thanks.

No problem! 😀 We just want the less informed to get the proper information when they look at this every month.

 

[dosmastr]

Do these best bang for buck estimations include extra money spent for heatsink?? 125watts of heat for some of those athlons!

 

[Sakkura]

Do these best bang for buck estimations include extra money spent for heatsink?? 125watts of heat for some of those athlons!

Nope, but as for the Athlons you need to bear in mind that AMDs TDPs are a lot less accurate than Intel's. They seem to divide most desktop processors into three groups - 140W, 125W and 95W. Intel, on the other hand, has tons of different TDPs even if you exclude their low-power models (-S and -T SKUs).

 

[ForcedRegistration]

Why are there comments from January 2013 when the top if this article is dated as September 2013?

Anyhow, it's a bit strange that only the lower end AMD CPU's were tested. I was just looking over a benchmarking site, and it shows the AMD FX Eight-Core CPUs were about the same as Intel i7, for two-thirds the cost. But having been told that raw benchmarking scores don't mean that much for gaming, I came here to look for gaming benchmarks and while I see several high-end Intel CPUs being tested, there's no mention of the equivalent tier AMD CPUs. Perhaps this was some kind of oversight, but i'd really like to see some testing for a AMD FX-8350 Eight-Core or 8320, if they gaming benchmarks are as good as the raw ones, then that could easily save $150 over the Intel CPU with same performance.

 

[logainofhades]

They just copy and paste most of this list with a few changes here and there. Instead of making a new thread every month, they just kept it to this one.

 

[InvalidError]

Why are there comments from January 2013 when the top if this article is dated as September 2013?

Because they update the story instead of creating a new one, which is a somewhat odd way of proceeding IMO since that prevents people from going back to previous iterations to see what X amount of money used to be enough for Y quarters/years ago.

 

[Sakkura]

Why are there comments from January 2013 when the top if this article is dated as September 2013?

Anyhow, it's a bit strange that only the lower end AMD CPU's were tested. I was just looking over a benchmarking site, and it shows the AMD FX Eight-Core CPUs were about the same as Intel i7, for two-thirds the cost. But having been told that raw benchmarking scores don't mean that much for gaming, I came here to look for gaming benchmarks and while I see several high-end Intel CPUs being tested, there's no mention of the equivalent tier AMD CPUs. Perhaps this was some kind of oversight, but i'd really like to see some testing for a AMD FX-8350 Eight-Core or 8320, if they gaming benchmarks are as good as the raw ones, then that could easily save $150 over the Intel CPU with same performance.

Tom's Hardware did test the FX-8350. Only 3 games used in the original review, but more have been added since. Like in the Crysis 3 article, where the 8350 was beaten by a Core i5-3550.

The 8350 does come close to Core i7s in quite a few programs (3ds max for example), but as soon as you run into poorly threaded workloads it really gets left behind. Same goes for most games (many of which are poorly threaded as well).

 

[ForcedRegistration]

Why are there comments from January 2013 when the top if this article is dated as September 2013?

Anyhow, it's a bit strange that only the lower end AMD CPU's were tested. I was just looking over a benchmarking site, and it shows the AMD FX Eight-Core CPUs were about the same as Intel i7, for two-thirds the cost. But having been told that raw benchmarking scores don't mean that much for gaming, I came here to look for gaming benchmarks and while I see several high-end Intel CPUs being tested, there's no mention of the equivalent tier AMD CPUs. Perhaps this was some kind of oversight, but i'd really like to see some testing for a AMD FX-8350 Eight-Core or 8320, if they gaming benchmarks are as good as the raw ones, then that could easily save $150 over the Intel CPU with same performance.

Tom's Hardware did test the FX-8350. Only 3 games used in the original review, but more have been added since. Like in the Crysis 3 article, where the 8350 was beaten by a Core i5-3550.

The 8350 does come close to Core i7s in quite a few programs (3ds max for example), but as soon as you run into poorly threaded workloads it really gets left behind. Same goes for most games (many of which are poorly threaded as well).

Ah, thanks much for the quick responses. Hmm, I guess you really do get what you pay for, more or less. That is, at least until game devs start doing a better job with threads.

 

[Zibri]

I actually have a core i7 950 clocked stable at 4ghz. I wonder what would be a candidate for my next system. I don't need integrated hd video since I have dual geforce cards in SLI. I won't upgrade until I find a CPU that will perform, overclocked as fast as double my current setup.

 

[Zibri]

I actually have a core i7 950 clocked stable at 4ghz. I wonder what would be a candidate for my next system. I don't need integrated hd video since I have dual geforce cards in SLI. I won't upgrade until I find a CPU that will perform, overclocked as fast as double my current setup.

 

[Sakkura]

I actually have a core i7 950 clocked stable at 4ghz. I wonder what would be a candidate for my next system. I don't need integrated hd video since I have dual geforce cards in SLI. I won't upgrade until I find a CPU that will perform, overclocked as fast as double my current setup.

You'll probably have to wait another 2-3 years then. Haswell isn't that huge of an upgrade, nor is Vishera. Broadwell won't be significantly better than Haswell, so on the Intel side you're probably looking at Skylake.

 

[Memnarchon]

I actually have a core i7 950 clocked stable at 4ghz. I wonder what would be a candidate for my next system. I don't need integrated hd video since I have dual geforce cards in SLI. I won't upgrade until I find a CPU that will perform, overclocked as fast as double my current setup.

You'll probably have to wait another 2-3 years then. Haswell isn't that huge of an upgrade, nor is Vishera. Broadwell won't be significantly better than Haswell, so on the Intel side you're probably looking at Skylake.

Not really. I don't think so. A six core Ivy bridge extreme i7 4930K @4,5Ghz should have double the performance of a core i7 950 @4Ghz at heavy multithreaded programmes (30-40% from architecture, 10% from clocks, 50% more cores). The real question is... at what price... 😛

 

[Sakkura]

I actually have a core i7 950 clocked stable at 4ghz. I wonder what would be a candidate for my next system. I don't need integrated hd video since I have dual geforce cards in SLI. I won't upgrade until I find a CPU that will perform, overclocked as fast as double my current setup.

You'll probably have to wait another 2-3 years then. Haswell isn't that huge of an upgrade, nor is Vishera. Broadwell won't be significantly better than Haswell, so on the Intel side you're probably looking at Skylake.

Not really. I don't think so. A six core Ivy bridge extreme i7 4930K @4,5Ghz should have double the performance of a core i7 950 @4Ghz at heavy multithreaded programmes (30-40% from architecture, 10% from clocks, 50% more cores). The real question is... at what price... 😛

50% more cores doesn't mean 50% more performance. A lot of things won't be able to use the extra cores.

 

[daswilhelm]

Do these best bang for buck estimations include extra money spent for heatsink?? 125watts of heat for some of those athlons!

I actually have a core i7 950 clocked stable at 4ghz. I wonder what would be a candidate for my next system. I don't need integrated hd video since I have dual geforce cards in SLI. I won't upgrade until I find a CPU that will perform, overclocked as fast as double my current setup.

you won't find a solid upgrade for another 2+ years

 

[Memnarchon]

50% more cores doesn't mean 50% more performance. A lot of things won't be able to use the extra cores.

Reading the whole post is awesome sometimes...

A six core Ivy bridge extreme i7 4930K @4,5Ghz should have double the performance of a core i7 950 @4Ghz at heavy multithreaded programmes

😛

 

[Sakkura]

50% more cores doesn't mean 50% more performance. A lot of things won't be able to use the extra cores.

Reading the whole post is awesome sometimes...

A six core Ivy bridge extreme i7 4930K @4,5Ghz should have double the performance of a core i7 950 @4Ghz at heavy multithreaded programmes

😛

I did read it, but I don't care for your attempt at moving the goalposts. Zibri said nothing about heavy multithreaded programs.