Is AMD a viable option right now?

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schecterplayer

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Jan 26, 2012
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hey everyone. i am a pc gamer and have been for about a year now ( loved that i switched ). but i have a phenom 2 x4 945 which is kinda dated and i want to upgrade. i have been looking at newegg for awhile and amd is always less expensive than intel but the drawback is performance. but how bad are these new amd chips? i was looking into a 2500k but i dont want to shove that kind of money into my rig if its purely gaming oriented. like all i have is games on it. so its not for anything but gaming. so i want to know if amd is really a viable option for my needs.

any help is greatly appreciated :)
 
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Why do you want to switch. The Phenom II is old but it is still a good CPU and can handle pretty much all games just fine. If you feel it's a little slow overclock it if you haven't done that yet.
As for the second part the I5 is much better than both the Phenom II and Piledriver when it comes to gaming. It is not overkill for a gaming computer in fact it is probably one of the best CPU's for gaming in terms of price to performance.
 
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hey all thanks for the feedback. i just wanna make clear i have a overclock from 3 to 3.45 on my cpu and still get massive fps drops in gw2 on higher settings. like 60 to 1 fps when turning. unless u guys think i really dont need to upgrade. i really love my rig now but i mean come on its from 2008
 
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What GPU do you have - if you have a decent GPU then you shouldn't be getting drops like that - your GPU may be the performance problem. Also, the Piledriver chips really are not as good as the Phenoms. My mates 8Core FX is slightly slower than my 4ghz Phenom 970BE.
 
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definatly not an issue with the gpu. i have the msi gtx 660
 
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i have the gtx 660 and am not going to an amd. i love nvidia. why would i upgrade from a 660? i have oc'd to 3.45. my motherboard is a biostar ta790gx 128m with 5 gigs ddr2 ram. now the ram is odd. i have 3 sticks of 1 gig and 1 stick of 2 gigs all at different timings
 
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my freind has a 3570k and a 660 and he plays gw2 maxed settings constant 60 fps
 
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Overclocking is the way to go.

In my experience, most Phenom II's can overclock to 3.9Ghz - 4.1Ghz quite easily.

I can't recall ever not being able to get a Phenom II to 3.9Ghz or more with a decent cooler (CM-212). At those speeds you will be very close if not equal to Sandy Bridge I-5 performance in most situations.

My Phenom II 965 @ 4.1Ghz is just as fast as my 2500K at stock speeds.

The FX-6300 is a great CPU at it's price point.
 
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Any unlocked Phenom II X4 "Black Edition" (955, 965, 970) should get to 4.0 Ghz with a decent air cooler. You should notice a decent difference in most games with an extra 600 Mhz over what your locked X4 945 can do. I have an X4 980 BE @ 4.0 Ghz paired with a GTX 670 and they do fine together, but I don't play MMOs (just single player RPGs). Multiplayer scenarios do tax a CPU more than single player games.
 
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my motherboard is very odd. i cant for the life of me change the voltages. i cant run a single gpu in 16x. it runs 8x. i have been through every forum out there and it just seems my board sucks. the only way i can overclock is through the bios an using the werid auto overclock system. which again doesnt even auto change voltages
 
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so a phenom 2 965 that i can overclock properly will greatly improve over my 945? plus appearently ddr3 makes a big difference?
 
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