Picking A Sub-$200 Gaming CPU: FX, An APU, Or A Pentium?

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Don the article is a bit misleading ... till I read it a second time.

All of these systems tested had an external high end graphics card bolted in ... a 7970.

I think many started to read the article thinking the CPU's with onchip GPU's were being used ... like I did ... then went "um er ??" when I realised some didn't.


Rerun the benchies for the CPU's that have an ondie GPU and see what results you get.

The AMD processors rape the Intel offerings across the board.

Compare all of these again and correct me If I am wrong.

Lets reccomend the processors on the basis of gaming results with the ondie GPU / CPU combination ...
:)

 
A Pentium G630 @ $80 + a $65 video card (HD6570 or GT430) vs a A8 3870k, both with a total cost of $145 would still lean quite favorably toward the Intel model however. Not to mention give you a much better upgrade path down the line.

The F1 socket will on the other hand be extremely limited always because even if you wanted to get a better GPU later, you'd be stuck with a limited CPU. Not only is the G630 a going to give a new GPU much more headroom right off the bat, but it can have a i5-2400 or better dropped into the same socket if you really want a CPU boost.

The A4-3400 isn't bad as a living room PC to stream media too with it's superior built in GPU for playback. But it's far to limited to be seriously considered for gaming no matter what.

Saying compare them with their integrated GPU's is just silly because the only one that could remotely be used for gaming, the A8-3870k, is still bested by the equivalent amount of $ spent on an Intel CPU + discrete GPU. The only one that would pull ahead in that regard, the A4-3400 is still so bad it wouldn't ever be used for that.

AMD really just needs to keep producing the Phenom2 x4 & x6's until they can make a decent Bulldozer revision with Piledriver. An unlocked Phenom 2 x4 at $100 and x6 at $150 would still be good buys for people doing budget gaming & editing work respectively. Discontinuing those is a big mistake.

A die-shrink of the Phenom2's would have been even better, but that's basically out at this point. :\
 
[citation][nom]de5_roy[/nom]i think pentium g620 + biostar h61 + radeon hd 6570 1 gb can compete very well against an md a8 3870k + a55/a75 mobo. it depends on how you configure your pc.[/citation]

The g620 could only provide similar performance in games and single threaded apps. When multithreading is involved, the 3870k murders it due to the 620's lack of HT. This doesn't even take into consideration OC potential.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/399?vs=406

You'd also likely get a better A75 board for the price than you would an H61. AMD doesn't have several chipsets that can do "x but not y" like Intel does.

[citation][nom]reynod[/nom]Don the article is a bit misleading ... till I read it a second time.All of these systems tested had an external high end graphics card bolted in ... a 7970.I think many started to read the article thinking the CPU's with onchip GPU's were being used ... like I did ... then went "um er ??" when I realised some didn't.Rerun the benchies for the CPU's that have an ondie GPU and see what results you get.The AMD processors rape the Intel offerings across the board.Compare all of these again and correct me If I am wrong.Lets reccomend the processors on the basis of gaming results with the ondie GPU / CPU combination ...[/citation]

AMD wins for integrated, no contest. That's already been proven. Intel can't compete with AMD at GPUs. Most people building a gaming PC however want upgradeability and better than a 6500 series to start with. Hybrid crossfire is only an option for mid level GPUs and doesn't always work, so for a lot of gaming builds the integrated GPU is pointless. That is unless integrated is the best you can afford. Llano is still an integrated capable of playing modern games, although at low settings. It's better than a console at any rate.

What COULD be an interesting integrated piece would maybe compare samples of the entire Llano line, A4, A6, and A8, to HD2000 and 3000 and see exactly where they all fall in comparison.
 
[citation][nom]JohnMD1022[/nom]If you have access to a Microcenter store, ours is currently offering the i5-2500k for 179.99 and it has been as low as 149.99.[/citation]
The core i3-2100 is also only $99.99 there. And just for reference the i7-2600k is $279.99 at microcenter.
 
[citation][nom]Youngmind[/nom]Does anybody else still think of Pentium 4s and the other flops that Intel created when they see "Pentium?"[/citation]
From a gaming standpoint, there's no bigger flop out there than a chip called "bulldozer". Additionally, the only reason Pentiums were not considered the greatest was because 10 years ago, AMD provided competition. Unfortunately, this is not the case any longer. With AMD out of the running and the release of the 2011 platform, we are seeing Intel realize they can charge whatever the hell they want for their new chips. We as consumers lose out.
 
[citation][nom]reynod[/nom]Don the article is a bit misleading ... till I read it a second time.All of these systems tested had an external high end graphics card bolted in ... a 7970.I think many started to read the article thinking the CPU's with onchip GPU's were being used ... like I did ... then went "um er ??" when I realised some didn't.Rerun the benchies for the CPU's that have an ondie GPU and see what results you get.The AMD processors rape the Intel offerings across the board.Compare all of these again and correct me If I am wrong.Lets reccomend the processors on the basis of gaming results with the ondie GPU / CPU combination ...[/citation]

But if playing on-board GPUs then all of these titles would be unplayable at these settings. The idea is that at 1080p (a reasonable resolution to test at these days with the proliferation of 1080p screens, even if many are still at slightly lower resolutions). There is no onboard GPU (AMD or Intel) that can play at 1080p at medium settings and keep up with frame rate, much less at high settings. Onboard GPUs are relegated for business machines, and the most basic entry level gaming. When IB comes out in a few months then we may finally see some 1/2 decent mid-range GPU scores, but for the moment it is irrelivant. unless you can score a minimum 30FPS at medium settings at 1080p then you NEED a GPU for that extra kick.

Also, the prices here are for retail cost of the processors and do not include any sales, rebates, or discounted prices like Microcenter has. I got my 2600 from Microcenter for $250, the 2500K is $180, and the 2500 (when they have one) is $150. When you can get a solid gaming CPU for $100-150, and 8GB of good Ram is $40-50, it really makes one wonder who wouldn't upgrade these days. Asside from HDDs and GPUs, everything from cases to PSUs to CPUs are dirt cheap these days. And for the first time, CPUs are adequate to the task of most games and programs these days, and with the announcements coming out about the new Wii and xBox, I get the feeling these SB chips will be adequate for a good long time to come.
 
I don't get the point of using a discrete GPU here. If you are talking about low end gaming setups. The unlocked A8-3870 K is $144 at Newegg as I type this. So what Intel CPU + discrete GPU could I get for the same $144? And would it perform as well.

Very poorly written article, that misses the entire point of its title.
 
[citation][nom]Yargnit[/nom]The Phenom 2 x6's (which now appear to be all out of stock) for selective use, and maybe the FX4100 is really all AMD has left that's semi-viable anymore. IT's not looking good for AMD that's for sure. :\[/citation]

Man I was thinking the same thing and I'm a bit of an AMD fan. I've used AMD for the past 8 years or so and am currently running the Phenom 2 x6. It will last me the rest of this year, but unless AMD does something dramatic I can't see myself upgrading to another AMD product.
 
[citation][nom]jezus53[/nom]I completely agree. I've been wanting to build a somewhat light gaming machine based on these APUs but I haven't really found anyone that tests them all as they are. Instead they throw in a discrete card and scream intel is better. Though that is true with discrete graphics, I want to know how it does with the GPU on die because I know the APUs will destroy the intel CPUs when it comes to all around performance based on integrated graphics.[/citation]

[citation][nom]reynod[/nom]Don the article is a bit misleading ... till I read it a second time.All of these systems tested had an external high end graphics card bolted in ... a 7970.I think many started to read the article thinking the CPU's with onchip GPU's were being used ... like I did ... then went "um er ??" when I realised some didn't.Rerun the benchies for the CPU's that have an ondie GPU and see what results you get.[/citation]

Both of these have a valid point, but then you think about it for a second. If you are going to be gaming at all you need a discrete graphics card. Since this is a budget based comparison I'm not sure why they didn't use something like a 550 ti and a 6770 to compare the machines.

Sure the AMD on board is the best on board out there, and it's fine for playing videos or playing some games on your 1366x768 screen at medium or low settings. It isn't, however, any good for actual gaming.

Near the start of the article they stated "Our goal is to demonstrate real-world gaming environments." . . . real worl gaming environments do not use on board video.
 
Need some real world programs running as these lab tests could be meaningless depending on use. Get some software to do a small amount of constant work to simulate real world testing and retry these games. The average gamer has a voip, anti-virus, software firewall, and its impossible to predict the value of an under used core when latency is important. My guess is the dual and triple cores will see much higher latency in games. The latency in BF3 would be what I would want to see.
 
The AMD APUS are at a disadvantage here. They are intended for really low budget gaming. It would be interesting to see the comparison between the APU's & Intels I5's without a video card as most people buying an APU wouldn't be buying an expensive video card.
 
Oh come on. The article's about the best CPU you can pick under $200 that won't bottleneck a decent GPU that much. It's about picking the best CPU, with the intention of gaming, that'll provide decent balance to a rig.

I think it's useless saying that "oh nooo stupid article because it doesn't use the APU". No! that's not what the article was about anyway! if it was, i'm sure Don wouldn't have been using FX processors in the article, or intel HD 2000. And the article would have been "best sub-$200 APU" or "budget gaming with APUs" or something.

Heck, when Llano released they did highlight its performance advantages while using the IGP. This piece was supposed to investigate how the pentuim's and budget oriented Zambezi and llano would perform vs the i5s, and maybe the i3.

Very useful for sub $500 gaming rigs. Would you try to pair the i3-2100 with a radeon 5770/6770 at that price or would you run around saying "get llano!!!"? Of course it varies from situation to situation, and this article helps take that variance into account. Though had an Llano vs Pentium + cheap discrete also been covered, i think that would have helped a lot.

Although the article was great from a gaming pov, i was hoping for synthetic/productivity + efficiency benchmarks too. This would have been great for BestConfigs.

Overall a great job, i know you've been working on this for months, and the effort must have been huge, keep it up.

Cheers!
 
Sad day for AMD or the sad day just got sadder. I hope that they will come out with a viable cpu that can compete with Intel's soon or they will completely disapear from the list. Or they can just drop the prices lower. I've always looked at AMD whenever I wanted to build a cheap gaming rig and won't even consider intel but now... it's hard not to consider intel for that anymore. So comon AMD, don't make me/us consumers think twice when want want the best bang for our buck.
 
This multitasking benchmark shows how important an under used core becomes in real world gaming. The 955 pulls ahead of the i3 2100 and the X4 645 loss less FPS than the X3 455.
MultiTasking.png
 
[citation][nom]elbert[/nom]This multitasking benchmark shows how important an under used core becomes in real world gaming. The 955 pulls ahead of the i3 2100 and the X4 645 loss less FPS than the X3 455.[/citation]

Yeah but, that is an intensive multi-task, and RAR is terrible software.

1st I'd have to ask why (or how) you would be doing file compression during a gaming session, and second I'd be asking why you are not using 7zip if you want to flaunt your cores.
 
[citation][nom]LORD_ORION[/nom]Yeah but, that is an intensive multi-task, and RAR is terrible software. 1st I'd have to ask why (or how) you would be doing file compression during a gaming session, and second I'd be asking why you are not using 7zip if you want to flaunt your cores.[/citation]
You would need to ask Don as that it was his article. Its more about which CPU's are being under utilized. The majority of games are still only highly depended on 2 threads. Yes the compression is a touch much but if latency is the untested it is more important than 100FPS compared to 60FPS. To compare the duals and triple cored CPU's may need VisionTek Bigfoot Killer 2100 Gaming Network Card to get the same latency.
 
It should be pretty obvious, PC games are mostly terrible at multi-threading because they are either console ports, GPU bound, or just all around terribly coded.

The speed really does pay off on the higher end Intel cpus.

Basically, an i3-2100 is your minimum target, and an i5-2400 doesn't really have a reason to be exceeded.

If you can't spec your system to fall into that CPU range, don't waste your money because you'll regret is shortly down the road. Really, it looks like the amount of money required to step up to an i3-2100 would only be about 10% of your total system cost, and getting the hyper threading vs a G860 is a good idea to have some moderate future proofing.

As for llano, still a terrible idea in the long run. Low-end but sufficient for gaming discrete cards continue to get churned out and dropped in price. A 2100 will probably still be going strong 2 years from now with a modest GPU update. If you have a Llano you are pooched.
 
I'm still waiting for an in depth exploration of an FX 8 core with one core from each module disabled, how well it would perform and overclock compared to regular FX 8 core CPUs and the rest of the CPUs worth buying. It has been shown that disabling 1 core from each module improves single-threaded performance significantly (about 10-15% as shown in a previous test). It should also use less power with only half the cores so should overclock further, maybe making the FX-8120 viable in gaming. Would this be enough for it to become considerable? I'd like to know although I don't think it would beat Intel's stuff but it might meet or beat AMD's Phenom IIs that way.

I don't remember the site where this was checked but it was only glanced at, not looked into seriously. They just disabled a core from each module of an 8120 or 8150 and compared it to itself without disabling any cores, both at stock clocks.

Besides that, good article. Really tells us about how far behind AMD has gotten. We all saw what happened when Intel tried to get huge clock rates to make up for huge pipelines and other IPC killers with Netburst so we all should know how that failed. Honestly, AMD could have pulled it off if what Cliff A. Maier said about the automated design used in FX chips is true, 20% more power usage for 20% less performance and 20% larger die size. If not for this then AMD would have an okay product but it still wouldn't be a good replacement for the Phenom II line.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20111013232215_Ex_AMD_Engineer_Explains_Bulldozer_Fiasco.html
There's plenty of sites that covered this problem so look around if you want to, I saw it first at news.softpedia.com.

It would also have been nice to know when each of those CPUs become CPU limited in each game. Basically see what video cards are the best each one can make good use of in gaming overall. That would be more relevant then using a 7970 with each CPU since it probably has about the same or a higher price than what people looking at these CPUs want to pay. It makes a great show of telling us what each CPU can handle and is definitely nice to see but it doesn't give us a good picture of what these CPUs can do with a budget-oriented card. Obviously, any CPU that didn't do good enough with the 7970 won't do good enough with anything else but it's still seems like using a synthetic benchmark to show performance instead of a real life benchmark.

Also, I know games don't use many threads very well but I'm curious, does using multiple GPUs instead of a single, fast GPU make a difference on CPUs with multiple, slower cores? For example, the GTX 295 and Radeon 4870X2 have similar performance to a single GTX 480, GTX 570, and Radeon 6970 (according to Tom's). Would the dual GPU card's outperform the single GPU cards with similar performance on a CPU that uses many threads to make up for low single threaded performance like the Phenom II x6s or the FX CPUs? I assume it wouldn't do much better, if at all, but it seems to be a valid question, especially if you have two GTX 295s or Radeon 4870X2s against two Radeon 6970s or GTX 480/570s. Ignoring micro-stuttering and similar multi-GPU problems of course, that would skew the answer(s) of my question too much anyway.
 
[citation][nom]reynod[/nom]Don the article is a bit misleading ... till I read it a second time.All of these systems tested had an external high end graphics card bolted in ... a 7970.I think many started to read the article thinking the CPU's with onchip GPU's were being used ... like I did ... then went "um er ??" when I realised some didn't.Rerun the benchies for the CPU's that have an ondie GPU and see what results you get.The AMD processors rape the Intel offerings across the board.Compare all of these again and correct me If I am wrong.Lets reccomend the processors on the basis of gaming results with the ondie GPU / CPU combination ...[/citation]

I don't think it's misleading at all, as the title is "Sub-$200 Gaming CPU".

Nobody is going to use integrated graphics for a gaming rig. As good as Llano's integrated graphics is, i wouldn't recommend it to someone who wants their PC primarily for gaming.

I've wanted to do a piece that looks at Llano in its element, though. That might be coming up soon.
 
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