nitty gritty questions about the FX series

g335

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Oct 14, 2008
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Hello

I have some nitty gritty questions about the FX8350

I have asked before if its a good thing. I get the fan boys and more.

So far Ive been told what I want to use it for is fine.
Graphic Design, 3D design and rendering, movie making and some games, music production.

I was about to buy the FX8350 but than I read more posts about AMD and Intel.

I know Intel Is better, but is the FX8350 really that bad? I the Intel is better but I am thinking that it is something you really want notice unless doing the stuff I plan on doing and other things.

I will only play a small amount of games. I am not building a gaming pc, I am building a work station that I will game on sometimes.
I will play some MMO games, RTS games rpg's and more.
I have a 60HZ IPS monitor so I wont see frames about 60fps on my computer.
I will get a 2560x1440 IPS monitor for work or a second 24 moniter.

I just need a cpu that will do what I need it to do and not take forever. I am moving up from a Q6600.

So will the FX8350 do what I need it to do and will it do it well(I know its not the best)?
and have everything to build my pc except for the cpu and mb.

I will build a i7 5820K system later this year.

The reason why I am builing a FX is because of its low price and mainly because I have 16gigabytes of DDR2133 rm which I cannot return.

Should I go ahead and just buy the cpu and mb and be done with it?

The i7 4790K is out of my price range and so is the i758 20k that is why I am saving money for it.

If the FX8350 well give me good results than I will get it.

I could stretch my budget to buy the i7 4790k or the i7 5820K, but that would really hurt my savings

The i75820K I will buy later this year.

FX or no FX?

 
If your concern is budget, then AMD beat's Intel 9/10 times. This will work great in applications that can take advantage of multiple cores and great in games. Most games are limited by your GPU, and CPU only comes in if it's bottle necking the GPU. My 8350 is overclocked to 4.5 GHz on air.

Also AMD has proven to have a better upgrade options then Intel.
 
I agree with laviniuc, and will add to it. Consider carefully why you are upgrading at all. If it is to get more threads, then the FX is not unreasonable. If, otoh, you need better per-thread performance, then you do not want FX; getting an i3 (with plans to upgrade to an i7 later) makes much more sense. Your non-pro stuff, like MMO and RP games, specifically benefits from higher per-core performance; the FX may not show much improvement if any. Since this isn't a gaming PC, you probably don't care, but make sure your pro software benefits from more threads, rather than just faster threads.
If the Pro stuff can use GPGPU processing, a graphics card upgrade may help you too. See if your software prefers nVidia's or AMD's architecture, or will use either. A new graphics card (and possibly the PSU to run it) would be movable into your new rig later, so would not be money wasted.
Unless your current LGA775 board uses DDR3, I would not spend money on more RAM now (unless you're really RAM-limited).
 

I'm sorry, these points (especially the last) may have been true several years ago, but are definitely not today.
This is not a gaming PC, but if it were, in general 2 fast threads beats even 8 slow ones, since many games run only a couple of threads. New ones are getting better, but most, especially the types the OP plays, are poorly-threaded.
A money-making business system is typically not overclocked at all, or if it is, is not taken to the edge of stability. This must be considered when comparing the performance of these CPUs. Overclocked, the FX might see significant gains, but at stock can be sluggish compared to stock Intel.
 


I have tried to stick with it, and its overclocked but everything is slow on the pc now, I have multiple windows open and its even slower, when I use the graphic design software the computer is super slow and will crash or take a long time to do something.



The software that I am choosing takes the more core/threads that you have, the more it will use.

I bought the ram because I was going to build a FX8350 system before but than later I started reading about the FX vs i7-5 war/debate.

I have all of the pieces for a new system except for the cpu and mb.

I am reusing the psu from this pc, its a aftermarket one.

I cannot return the ram that I bought. So I have to build a FX or Intel machine.

I am building a i7 5820k machine later this year. I want to pc's. One will be the 2nd rendering/home pc/gaming pc/ node while the i7 5820k will be the main system for heavy work.

But for now I will only have the FX or Intel system that I will build. I need a new pc now.
 
If your software uses as many threads as it can get, then it may be very well suited for the FX. See if any benchmarks are available and compare.
When you select a motherboard, see https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AgN1D79Joo7tdE9xMUFlMEVWeFhuckJEVF9aMmtpUFE&gid=2 for an idea of what boards to avoid due to VRM issues. For a business system, you may want the reliability implied by the Asus 990FX Sabertooth's 5-year warranty, although it is a rather expensive board. A 970 system with VRMs on its heatsinks may be sufficient. Make sure it is a true 900-series board; any "960" or "980" will actually be an old 700-series with some modern interfaces tacked onto it. The same is true of the ASRock 970DE.
 


Thank you.

I found this at the store M5A99FX PRO R2.0.

Gaming wont be that bad will it? It will still play the kind of games I play good wont it?
 
That's a decent motherboard.
Gaming will not be "bad" by any stretch. You'd have to look hard for the difference, and could likely compensate by adjusting settings a little. Gaming is generally most dependent on the graphics card, although you might see some lower minimums in MMO titles like Guild Wars 2.
 
There are a lot of reasons why people try to shy others from investing in an AM3+ platform, at the moment. The primary, and most cited reason, is because most of the games these days are terribly optimized for the current FX-line-up. They are coded to run on just a handful of cores, so they do no utilize all of what the FX has to offer. After that point, the current FX-line-up is not known for being power efficient.

With DirectX12 coming out, the reasons for gaming are not as strong. However, it is a three-year old platform, now. There are some new and updated interfaces and components which are out now that people like to have, whether they make a huge different or not. Most notably, natively supported USB 3.0, and PCIe 3.0.

If you plan on mostly rendering and editing, you will probably get more use and utility out of your FX-8350 than most other purchasers have in the last three years, since that is where they really seem to excel.