Fx 4170 or i3 2120

[zayzo]

Hello, i am wondering on whether i should gte the fx 4170 or the i3 2120... i plan on mostly gaming and on a 600$ budget and these are about in the same price range.

 

[Guest]

You can keep that trashy H61 mobo. Just sayin. lol

i like a lot of things that are cheap and trashy; especially on "date" night.

 

[mindless728]

Realistically AM3+ is only going to have 1 more cpu upgrade (Piledriver) before it is retired, so I wouldn't say that it has a "long" life ahead

 

[nekulturny]

Realistically AM3+ is only going to have 1 more cpu upgrade (Piledriver) before it is retired, so I wouldn't say that it has a "long" life ahead

And LGA1155 has none. While its true that PileDriver is still going to behind Intel, lets not forget that.

i like a lot of things that are cheap and trashy; especially on "date" night.

LOL. Yea, but a motherboard is a semi-long term relationship of 3 to 4 years. Stick with the ones you don't mind taking home to mama. 😀

 

[wr6133]

Hey,
If you're going to quote my response and call me "uneducated" at least read the entire thing. This is the last thing I said in that post:
"YES, you could most likely put that extra $50 or so saved on the cheaper CPU towards better graphics and games would run SLIGHTLY better, but then your computer is not upgradeable in the future as your CPU is bottlenecked and probably not in stock anymore"

I clearly acknowledge in this and other responses that you can build a "gaming" PC for $600 but that I didn't think the value was there long-term.

By bottlenecking the graphics card, I was talking about the one in two or three years. If he bought a dual-core CPU now for about $120 he'd be bottlenecked in the future. Okay, maybe some people don't care about two or three years down the road but I was pointing out that he probably couldn't buy a CPU for his motherboard by then.

So in other words, for the sake of $50 now to invest in a quad-core he would't have to replace his ENTIRE COMPUTER to upgrade in 2-3 years, just the graphics card.

So don't just skim though these comments looking to flame people.

I read your post shame I did as it is 30 seconds of my life I wont get back.... another 30 seconds of my life wasted on a mouth breathers musings.

Fact is somebody building on a budget wants the best performance right now not to piddle through for as you say 2-3 years then suddenly toss in a better GPU and get the performance they have missed for the past 2-3 years.... get the performance they missed 2 years ago at a point when their CPU thats been overkill for 2 years is on the edge of becoming underkill.

Building is about balancing your parts to meet your budget and need, I'm sure people will agree with that. Telling a guy on a LOW budget to get an expensive (and slightly lacklustre) CPU at the expense of the graphics when its purpose is gaming is full on dumb

 

[nekulturny]

I read your post shame I did as it is 30 seconds of my life I wont get back.... another 30 seconds of my life wasted on a mouth breathers musings.

Fact is somebody building on a budget wants the best performance right now not to piddle through for as you say 2-3 years then suddenly toss in a better GPU and get the performance they have missed for the past 2-3 years.... get the performance they missed 2 years ago at a point when their CPU thats been overkill for 2 years is on the edge of becoming underkill.

Building is about balancing your parts to meet your budget and need, I'm sure people will agree with that. Telling a guy on a LOW budget to get an expensive (and slightly lacklustre) CPU at the expense of the graphics when its purpose is gaming is full on dumb

Directed @ Photonboy,
There seems to be a perpetual misunderstanding of certain people, sadly even those with "Veteran" as their forum rank seem to forget some very basic things. A stronger CPU is great to have. However, when you're talking gaming performance, a strong CPU cannot make a weaker performing video card perform better. As such, you would be foolish to sacrifice on a GPU for the privilege of having an i5.

I'll say another thing about buying cheaper parts now with the intention of upgrading them later when you have more money. I'll say it again at the risk of offending those here I consider friends. This simply does not make sense most of the time. For an example scenario, if you know for a fact that an LGA1155 Pentium G850, or an i3 does not really meet your expectations prior to buying them, but you go ahead and buy them anyway. And you upgrade to an i5 at say 6 months to a year from then. That just is a waste of money, and you would have been better off waiting for another paycheck or two to get the parts you wanted all along.

Now the exception to this might be if say you upgrade your LGA1155 platform from a G850 to an i5-3570K or something, and then say you wanted to do a budget HTPC build for your family room or something so you buy a cheap H61 mobo to pair with the now unused G850. That makes sense, and can be justified. But letting the parts just lay around your house because you wanted "any old system ASAP" is just something I will never be able to understand.

So in other words, for the sake of $50 now to invest in a quad-core he would't have to replace his ENTIRE COMPUTER to upgrade in 2-3 years, just the graphics card.

Same applies to the video card, buy a crappy old 6670 or something when you really wanted the performance of a GTX 570. Save your money and buy the video card you wanted in the first place. Either way, in 2-3 years the CPU will be outdated too. Granted the i5 is going to give the system more longevity, but you still effectively box yourself into a corner with performance either way you slice it.

 

[xtreme5]

Guys stop it, the answer for the OP is get i3 2120 have good frequency 3.3Ghz so this is enough, on the other side fx-4170 isn't a true quad core cpu may be 3ish.

 

[Goden]

Guys stop it, the answer for the OP is get i3 2120 have good frequency 3.3Ghz so this is enough, on the other side fx-4170 isn't a true quad core cpu may be 3ish.

Can we please stop trying to herd him towards the i3. We have given him plenty of reasons why the 4170 is better in his situation.

Christ the fanboyism on this forum is so painful to read sometimes.

 

[Goden]

but it's not..

If he can get it cheap then sure, but as mentioned before - the socket is a dead end.

 

[wr6133]

Can we please stop trying to herd him towards the i3. We have given him plenty of reasons why the 4170 is better in his situation.

Christ the fanboyism on this forum is so painful to read sometimes.

errr its not

Phenom II

i3

Cyrix 686

FX

 

[yummerzzz]

Don't listen to people who say "Get the FX 4170 same it's the same as the FX-4100 derpa", it isn't. The much higher base clock of the FX-4170 allows higher over clocks meaning better performance, a FX-4100 can reach 4.5Ghz, from 3.6, with the 4.2Ghz base clock, the 4170 can reach higher, if you're wondering what this compares to against an i3,i5,PHII955 etc.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-fx-pentium-apu-benchmark,3120-9.html

Just some food for thought.

 

[wr6133]

Phenom II 965 + £20 cooler 4GHz a reasonable and common point people OC too and by the chart posted above beats an FX clocked at 4.5GHz

So to make the FX outperform the Phenom we need to top 4.5GHz ok thats doable if we buy a cooler costing twice as much...... well now we nearly spent i5 money to marginally outdo a Phenom II and we are using a crazy OC with a silly priced cooler.

FX 41xx makes no sense, 61xx makes even less sense, 81xx could make some sense if its prices dropped ALOT...... Piledriver will have the same price/performance issues when compared to Intel I would bet the farm on that

 

[yummerzzz]

Whichever is cheaper, to the point of being able to step up GPU power because I'm playing BF3 just fine..

EDIT: The FX-4100 doesn't need that great a cooler, I have a CM Hyper TX3, the first time I booted up this CPU (even on my 3+1 Phase mobo) I just upped the multi to reach 4.3Ghz and bumped up the voltage to 1.425, Primed for 8 hours no errors max temp was 52c I think?

EDIT 2 🙂P) : By BF3 I'm talking 64 player maps.

 

[Derkle]

I say that socket life is very important because that will determine how expensive it will be to upgrade later (just the cpu or the cpu and mobo). Right now I have an i5 2500 and got it on ebay for $170 with 4gb ram (which was a great deal) and it doesn't bottleneck any gpu that I have used. It is a great processor and when I was looking to upgrade from a Pentium D I looked at AMD, i3, i5 and i7 and the i5 came out on top for being medium priced with great performance. I personally am against buying brand new for certain parts like the cpu because they are so expensive and I have bought used processors that stay working for a long long time. My advice is to go with intel, but AMD will work just fine if you get a good price on something like an FX-8120.

 

[esrever]

Don't listen to people who say "Get the FX 4170 same it's the same as the FX-4100 derpa", it isn't. The much higher base clock of the FX-4170 allows higher over clocks meaning better performance, a FX-4100 can reach 4.5Ghz, from 3.6, with the 4.2Ghz base clock, the 4170 can reach higher, if you're wondering what this compares to against an i3,i5,PHII955 etc.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-fx-pentium-apu-benchmark,3120-9.html

Just some food for thought.

Most people seem to reach about 4.5ghz on a 4100, and very few people can push a 4170 above 4.7, the difference isn't worth the price difference.

 

[Guest]

Can we please stop trying to herd him towards the i3. We have given him plenty of reasons why the 4170 is better in his situation.

Christ the fanboyism on this forum is so painful to read sometimes.

whats this we you are talking about?
it appears you are the only one advising the FX chip . . . (eserver is a given :lol: )

must be the same as the 1155 is a dead socket. it does not mean that because intel actually improves the cpu's architecture and power consumption of its cpus, thereby needing a new pin out schematic, that the previous generation is dead. look how long the 775 lasted after the 1366 and 1156 came out. some folks are still rocking with a Q95xx chip in their gaming rig.

yeah sure, jumping from one high end set up to the next is a PITA to get another motherboard. but for the folks that usually do that; they can afford the cost. and it usually come with the whole motherboard chipset being upgraded or like DDR4 RAMwith haswell; so its not like only the socket changes.

so what if intel changes sockets as much as people change their underwear, as i have read in some comments. its better then putting dirty underwear back on after taking a shower. 😛

 

[Guest]

Go with Fx 4170 oc or not with a good graphics card you will get up to 100 fps in some betchmarks,

Nobady can play a game with 100 fps anyway:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_rate

 

[Guest]

if you have to there is nothing wrong with an i3-2120 and Z68 Gen3 or Z77 motherboard for starters..
then upgrade to a 2500K or 3570K in the near future.

all you have to do with the i3 is to stay outta BF3 multiplayer and you fine.
better than the 4170..

depends on the GPU.

a high end gpu 560ti 448 or above will choke it along with the game. a mid range like a 6850 will be fine.
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=32525813&postcount=47

 

[Guest]

nice read, thanks..
but I need to see more..

please forgive me for not having the time to grunge up the threads from the research i did the last time i got into a little "i3-2100 good enough for BF3 MP" flame war. i really need to start saving and organizing bookmarks better.

it appeared at that time, and your reply reminded me, that in the instance of an i3 and BF3 MP was when it was more important to have a balanced cpu/gpu configuration; a high end gpu would be spitting out frames faster than a loaded i3 could handle and cause less than desirable performance.

granted a quad core i5 does not face such limitation since a "true" core is substantially better than a "thread" (i do believe and lend some credence to having read that a thread is approximately 30%of the performance of a core) but in the case of a 550ti or even a 7770 the gpu would not overload the i3 since it would be facing a performance limitation while in game play itself.

now if i had the game and could benchmark it myself, it would go past conjecture when i would happily post the results here on THG and end the debate.

 

[nekulturny]

now if i had the game and could benchmark it myself, it would go past conjecture when i would happily post the results here on THG and end the debate.

Problem is with an MP bench is its hard to get consistent results, since you're at the mercy of whatever server you're playing on.

 

[esrever]

please forgive me for not having the time to grunge up the threads from the research i did the last time i got into a little "i3-2100 good enough for BF3 MP" flame war. i really need to start saving and organizing bookmarks better.

it appeared at that time, and your reply reminded me, that in the instance of an i3 and BF3 MP was when it was more important to have a balanced cpu/gpu configuration; a high end gpu would be spitting out frames faster than a loaded i3 could handle and cause less than desirable performance.

granted a quad core i5 does not face such limitation since a "true" core is substantially better than a "thread" (i do believe and lend some credence to having read that a thread is approximately 30%of the performance of a core) but in the case of a 550ti or even a 7770 the gpu would not overload the i3 since it would be facing a performance limitation while in game play itself.

now if i had the game and could benchmark it myself, it would go past conjecture when i would happily post the results here on THG and end the debate.

I'd say the threads in the i3 are like a 10% improvement at the most over the dual core in situations like gaming. The performance of hyperthreading will actually be worse than not having it if the game uses core parking and uses the virtual cores when there is resource left in the real cores. Personally I don't trust having hyperthreading as a substituted for cores or even as a stand in. When games use more active threads than the real cores but not fully use the real cores, its better to not have hyperthreading.

The FX41XX is a much better 4 threaded cpu than the i3.

 

[nekulturny]

The FX41XX is a much better 4 threaded cpu than the i3.

Benchmarks would seem to disagree with you. Skyrim for example uses all 4 cores on my Phenom II. It uses 2 cores heavily and the other 2 as needed depending on what I'm doing in game. If it primarily uses 2 cores and the other 2 on a situational basis, at least if I understand what you're saying wouldn't those be "parked cores"?

And FX CPUs take a huge performance hit in that particular game compared to Phenom IIs and even dual core i3s.

 

[Guest]

I'd say the threads in the i3 are like a 10% improvement at the most over the dual core in situations like gaming. The performance of hyperthreading will actually be worse than not having it if the game uses core parking and uses the virtual cores when there is resource left in the real cores. Personally I don't trust having hyperthreading as a substituted for cores or even as a stand in. When games use more active threads than the real cores but not fully use the real cores, its better to not have hyperthreading.

The FX41XX is a much better 4 threaded cpu than the i3.

WOW what a long line of conjecture to promote your favorite bulldozer.

so if the FX -41xx is a much better threaded cpu than the i3-2100 why is it that the i3 comes out ahead on a game that uses more than two cores like SC2?

you can guess about parked cores and virtual cores if you care to but what really matters is how long the pipeline is that the thread needs to travel; not all hyperthreading is the same.

 

[nekulturny]

I don't believe Starcraft II uses more than 2 cores.
http://www.techspot.com/review/305-starcraft2-performance/page13.html

These articles were done roughly the same time as that bit-tech one you linked unless Starcraft II added multi-core support in the 1 month gap between the articles, somethings fishy.

Starcraft II is a blizzard product is it not? WoW and Diablo don't use 4 threads, why would Starcraft II? Something else is at work there.

Although a possible argument could indeed be that Eserver is onto something about HT hurting performance. Since the i3 has it, and the i5-2400 doesn't. I dunno.

 

[Guest]

Although a possible argument could indeed be that Eserver is onto something about HT hurting performance. Since the i3 has it, and the i5-2400 doesn't. I dunno.

just some "popular wisdom" derived from one instance and that was on the game developer than the cpu:
an old post on a forum thread
Test system: i7 920, Classified E760, HD5870 stock clocks, 6gb ddr3 @ 1552mhz cas 7, win 7 x64, P64 Corsair ssd.

(there are a few more in that thread but for the sake of keeping it short and sweet.)
point being HT trades blows and having it on in any instance will not significantly hurt performance.

 

[nekulturny]

(there are a few more in that thread but for the sake of keeping it short and sweet.)
point being HT trades blows and having it on in any instance will not significantly hurt performance.

Understood, but that doesn't really explain whats going on with StarCraft II. I mean I can chalk up the dismal Bulldozer benches to well.. just because its Bulldozer. I'm just going to have to say that Starcraft II is shittily coded. Beyond that, it exceeds my technical knowledge to offer an explanation..