Custom build, contemplating which CPU to pick.

[Logan93]

Okay, so here's my dilemma. I don't have a whole lot of money to spend, and I am doing a new build. That's my first problem, but I'm going to keep going on past that lol. I'm looking at AMD due to my restricted budget. So my choice (assuming I went AMD), would be the FX-8320. If I go Intel, it would be the i5-4670K. The thing is, will I notice enough of a performance hit to hate the FX-8320? Would I even be better off with an i3? Here's what I'll do with the build.

* Small amount of gaming (and I don't mean all that much, I'm not about to drop $400 on a GPU.)
* Visual Studio
* Web Browsing (my grandma's dual core does that fine)
* Word, Excel
* Possibly a media share for TV
* Basic CAD

I can see VS running at the same time as Word & Excel with a browser window open, but other than that I like to keep multi-tasking between what I can run on dual monitors. Please, no fanboi's who are all "Intel FTW!!!" or "AMD FTW!!!", I'm tired of all your crap. Someone tell me straight, and somebody who maybe even has an FX-8320?

 

[JOOK-D]

I had an FX 8320 and it gamed just fine (fine, not the best)with a 7870. It's performance in comparison to intel will depend on which games you want to play - speaking of which, what are they?

The rest of what you want to do will be able to be handled by basically any modern CPU.

What are you looking to pair the FX with? Mobo, GPU, PSU etc.? And what's your budget for the whole thing?

Generally the FX will be good enough. A locked i5 would be fine too, something like a 4440.

 

[Silver Wolf]

I think you should go as big as possible within your budget. I went with a budget Pentium G2010 (about $80 new) until I got a bigger budget and spent it on a i5-3470 (about $190 new). I prefer the Intel versus AMD simply due to my own experience with them out performing the AMD processors with the newer models. I have an AMD Athlon 64 x2 4400+, no where near the performance of similar models of core2duo cpus. I use my i5-3470 (and previously my Pentium G2010) with 8gb DDR3 ram and play Mechwarrior online, do my web browsing, and an occassional item I will work on in Visual Studio 2012. My video card is also a budget card (about $40-50 new) - a AMD/ATI Radeon HD 6570 1gb model.

In short, for the stuff you listed most should be fine with your selection - but I do personally prefer the better performance of Intel over AMD (in all the models I own, the Intel processors of similar models to the AMD come with more cache which improves their performance in all tasks.

To see the comparison yourself, click here to see the difference between your choice of AMD cpu (an 8 core cpu) and the i5 model you are looking at.

You might save a few bucks by going with a different i5 model. Mine is a i5-3470 and is comparable to the AMD model you chose above.