FX 8350 vs phenom II x4 965

[Matthew Renna]

My friend wants to upgrade his cpu because he is complaining about poor performance in games like pubg and stuff. He's got a Phenom II x4 965, 8gb of ram, and a gtx 1050. Would it be best for him to get the fx 8350 or should he invest in building a new system?

 

[Barty1884]

I wouldn't suggest that "upgrade".

PUBG is a poor title to quantify performance though, as it's not fully optimized at this point (it's getting better, but it's not 'there' yet).

From a strict gaming perspective the 965 (and even the 8350) were bettered by "modern" (at the time) i3's.

If your friend is seeing wholesale issues across all titles, then a new system should be a consideration for the near future.
If it's just PUBG....it is what it is, right now.

If your friend is open to overclocking (and hasn't OC'd that Phenom already), i;d look to push as much performance out of it as possible.
In 2017, it's performing more in line with the lower FX options (4300 etc). An OC isn't going to miraculously fix that, but should help him push a little bit more performance from it.

Speaking of OCing..... a modern "budget" setup can be really solid for gaming too..... But something like a Ryzen3 (well, any of AMD's newer offerings really) heavily benefit from fast memory + overclocking.

An investment of <$250 would get him a very respectable low-mid range gaming setup, paired with the 1050.
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 3 1200 3.1GHz Quad-Core Processor ($109.87 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: ASRock - AB350M Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard ($40.98 @ Newegg)
Memory: G.Skill - Ripjaws V Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-3000 Memory ($88.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $239.84
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-10-19 17:33 EDT-0400

 

[jeffredo]

Any idea what his motherboard is? Regardless, an FX-8350 is going to be about 25% to 50% faster than a Phenom II X4 965 in today's games. They can be had new for around $100 now. The old Stars architecture of the Phenom II is missing a number of instructions that modern games use and the FX has.

 

[DSzymborski]

My friend wants to upgrade his cpu because he is complaining about poor performance in games like pubg and stuff. He's got a Phenom II x4 965, 8gb of ram, and a gtx 1050. Would it be best for him to get the fx 8350 or should he invest in building a new system?

An 8350 would have improved performance, but unless the motherboard can already handle it, I would not advise sinking money into this platform. It's one thing if you could just pop in an 8350; it's not a great CPU, but it's better than the 965 at modern games.

But if it requires buying an FX 8350 *and* a new motherboard? An 8350 does very poorly on budget motherboard and with the supply of the good AM3+ motherboards quickly evaporating (990FX and some of the 970s), you're looking at somewhere around $225 for the pair. That's a lot of money to sink into a 2011 platform when it isn't enough to fulfill the goal of making PUBG enjoyable.

TLDR: The motherboard information is crucial.

 

[Matthew Renna]

This is his motherboard
https://www.amazon.com/Asus-uATX-DDR3-SB710-Motherboard/dp/B0054U7HIO/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1508460575&sr=8-13&keywords=am3%2B+motherboard

Yes it supports an fx 8350

 

[BFG-9000]

Both those chips have about the same IPC as a Core 2 from 2006, with the difference being the Piledriver has twice as many slow cores, and can clock far higher. The problem is when you clock it fast enough to do some serious work, it draws over 200w, and that board with its lowly 4-phase VRM is only good to the 125w @ stock speed.

If your friend was using highly parallelizable apps like HPC, virtualization or database then it would be well worth it esp. if his electricity was free. Games aren't so it's not. Note that Phenom II had higher IPC than Bulldozer, and while Piledriver remedied this it's still slow at low clock speeds. Overclocked to 4GHz the Phenom II should be close enough and free.

 

[DSzymborski]

This is his motherboard
https://www.amazon.com/Asus-uATX-DDR3-SB710-Motherboard/dp/B0054U7HIO/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1508460575&sr=8-13&keywords=am3%2B+motherboard

Yes it supports an fx 8350

As in physically runs it, yes. But we get lots of problems with throttling with budget AM3+ motherboards (including this one) and any of the 125W CPUs. I would absolutely not bother with an 8350 in this case.

 

[Matthew Renna]

Thanks for the advice guys. I think I'll just tell him to overclock the hell out of his phenom and hope it goes better.

 

[sizzling]

Overclocking might yield some gains but with his motherboard I expect the results to be limited and again throttling may become a problem. Go with very gradual increases.

 

[CooLWoLF]

An alternative would be to drop in an FX6300 and give it a slight overclock. That board does support 140w CPUs. The 6300 is a 95w, so you would have some headroom to overclock with and not be throttled. Would be a fairly cheap upgrade.