i3 4th gen or FX6300?

[Rafael Mestdag]

Which one is best? The general consensus is that the i3 has better single core performance and the FX6300 has better multi-tasking performance.

Which one would you pick up if you had the choice? Why?

 

[n0ns3ns3]

For gaming, I'd go with intel since it simply work better.
For other uses, it is not really important which one you go.

 

[manv]

I would go with the i3. The FX series is practically dead with not many new processors coming into that platform or that particular socket.

Choosing a Haswell i3 you have the option to upgrade your processor to a plethora of intel haswell processors running on the LGA 1150 socket.
The FX has 6 slower cores while the i3 has 2 hyperthreaded faster cores. The FX is good for doing stuff like video rendering etc which will take the advantage of the extra cores but if you only want your PC for web browsing some light gaming etc the i3's fewer but faster cores will come to advantage.
Cheers!

 

[tibbee1996]

Take the FX-6300 and...."let the overcloks hit the flooooor".
Seriously you can get very far in terms of OC and get decent enough single core performance.
I use an FX-6300 in my own rig, and never dissapointed me.

By the way it's pretty darn cheap, and has got excellent performance in apps, which takes advantage of several cores (as it was mentioned before).
You can chill with the AMD FX until the Zen cpu-s comes out.

 

[Rafael Mestdag]

Yes, I'm using the Fx6300 on its stock clock(3.5Ghz) and it's still pretty quick overall. I can't overclock it right now because I don't have a good enough motherboard but I can imagine how fast it would be overclocked up to 4.8Ghz!!

 

[Ecky]

Skylake wasn't a revolutionary improvement, it was evolutionary. Even a Haswell i3 still has a 50-60% single-threaded advantage. The i3 4160 came with a 3.6ghz stock clock, which would roughly equal a 5.8ghz FX CPU in single-threaded performance. You can get fairly close with a healthy overclock - a 4.8-5ghz FX-6300 would not be significantly slower - but to get there, you'll have to spend some money on a motherboard, power supply, and cooler.

Hyperthreading is worth an average of 30% more throughput, which puts a stock i3 4160 at roughly the multithreaded performance of a 3ghz FX-6300, taking module penalty into account. So, at stock, an FX-6300 has a multithreaded advantage, but a lot less than you'd think considering it has 6 cores.

 

[Suzuki@1473780084@1473780163]

Some confusion here.

The FX shouldn't be considered for anything, not even multithreaded tasks. The reason is that not everything is multithreaded, you can look at rendering benchmarks (export), but that doesn't paint the whole picture. Most tasks leading up to that are single threaded or won't take advantage of all the threads. The i3 would win across the board when it comes to speed, all things considered.

 

[tibbee1996]

Overclock an FX-6300 to 4.3ghz is possible even with stock voltages. And you doesn't really need a high end mobo to get a decent overclock.
Then the multithreaded performance would be quite nice, which from many software benefits (and many not).
I've got a good old M5A97 EVO r2.0, and running an FX-6300 on 4.5 ghz with only a small voltage increase (currently on 1.275v).

I'm not saying that it will beat the s**t out of the intel i3 4160. But with some modficiations it can get ahead in multithread performance, and a tad bit closer in single threaded performance. And overclocking is a fun process i think, and the FX-6300 is a good starting point to experiment with.

On the other hand it's sad that we're in 2016 and increasing all the cores and threads in CPUs, but still more than half of the softwares just can't take the advantage of multiple threads.
It's like AMD always making products for an utopian world, where all of their technologies get utilised by hard-working developers. It's the same with their GCN architecture, and Mantle technology. But these techs never get fully utilised, thanks to software is always lags behind.

Intel's Skylake architecture is really impressive in many ways, but still i recommend the FX-6300, and hope that the Zen CPUs will bring back the healthy competing between AMD and Intel.