Best gaming/ Editing CPU for $300

daithi_

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Dec 24, 2014
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Pretty simple, the title says it all.
I am looking to upgrade CPU's soon, and I plan on spending around 300$ on it.
I will be mainly using this for gaming, with some video editing also.

Current setup:

Motherboard: ASUS M5A97 R2.0
GFX Card: GTX 970
Current CPU: AMD FX-6300
CPU Cooling: EVO 212
 
Solution
I recommend going for a Xeon, specifically the E3-1230 V3, and an H97 chipset motherboard. This will push you slightly over budget, but not by much.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/j8ry8d.

The Xeon is much faster in single-threaded use and likely to be slightly faster in multi-threaded use. It also runs considerably quieter and cooler than the 8350.

One thing to bear in mind is that the Xeon doesn't have an iGPU, so if your GTX 970 fails, you can't fall back on integrated graphics.


Well you could wait until what AMD Zen looks like performance wise then decide. But if you want a decent cpu now there really is only few choices.

For editing FX 8350/8320 is great with eight core cpus and gaming is decent. But if you want stronger cpu, then you only get a few intel choices, i5 4690k or i5 6600 skylake. But if you want skylake you will need DDR4 ram.
 
For your setup, I'd recommend the FX 8350, it has 8 cores and 8 threads capable of doing good video editing. If you are willing to change motherboards and shit you could get the Intel Xeon line which would be ~$250
 
I recommend going for a Xeon, specifically the E3-1230 V3, and an H97 chipset motherboard. This will push you slightly over budget, but not by much.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/j8ry8d.

The Xeon is much faster in single-threaded use and likely to be slightly faster in multi-threaded use. It also runs considerably quieter and cooler than the 8350.

One thing to bear in mind is that the Xeon doesn't have an iGPU, so if your GTX 970 fails, you can't fall back on integrated graphics.
 
Solution