Intel from AMD - Worth it or not?

[Kappta]

Hey guys. I have an amd fx 6300 in my system atm. My motherboard doesn't support overclocking but I know overclocking the fx6300 should bring out some kind of performance beast.

My question is: Should I just buy a good overclocking motherboard and an aftermarket cooler and OC the fx 6300 or should I go for a i5 4690/4690k, knowing that i would have to buy a new board aswell?

I have a GTX 760 at the moment. I play most of the recent titles and I am also thinking about getting a 770 or a 970. 8Gb of RAM and a 550W PSU, if that helps answering the question.

 

[synphul]

Since you already need a new board anyway, intel might be the better route for you. The cost of a decent motherboard plus an aftermarket cooler isn't really worth the performance gains from oc'ing the 6300 in my opinion. You'd get better performance from a 4690k even if you didn't want to oc it at first and skip an aftermarket cooler. Depending how poor the performance is to you right now it may be worth waiting for skylake but that could easily be a 6mo(?) wait.

Obviously the intel route would be more expensive since it means mobo + cpu so you're looking at around a $230 difference or so. If overclocking is something you'd like to do you could always get a z series motherboard and a locked i5 to save some cash. The 6300 isn't terrible, have you considered keeping it and seeing what performance you get with a new gpu? There's a big difference between the 760 and 970. Quite a difference between the 770 and 970 for that matter.

 

[DubbleClick]

A gigabyte b85 d3h + I5 4590 come at just $240 and save you the need to upgrade the psu, too.

 

[synphul]

The 4590 would be a good choice for a locked core i5 to save a few dollars. Looking at the prices on pcpartpicker, at least in the u.s. the b85's aren't much cheaper than the h97 which is a much more recent chipset. Rather than pairing a haswell refresh cpu with an outdated motherboard and potentially need a bios flash, no reason not to get a current motherboard for a current cpu.

The d3h is showing at $74 + shipping. Asrock's h97 anniversary is $75 including shipping. Gigabyte also has a z97 hd3 for $83 including shipping (after mir). Adapting a current older mobo for a cpu only upgrade would make sense, but not buying new and already starting out with 2yr old chipset in my opinion. The d3h may be different but all too often I see people buying a new good quality cpu then pairing it with a cheapy outdated mobo and running into problems and headaches with bios flashing, either not having an older chip to flash the bios or other issues.

 

[DubbleClick]

The b85 d3h has a lot more features and ports than the most h97 boards, though. Microcode didn't change for haswell refresh, so the chipset is absolutely unimportant unless you need to SLI, which requires >$100 z87/97 boards anyway. Other than that, h97 boards have no advantage over b85 boards that a consumer would ever use.

 

[Kappta]

Thanks for all the help guys. I will consider it when the time comes.