Should I trade an i5 3570k with a basic MSI MB for an FX8300 with a very high end MB?

Rafael Mestdag

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Mar 25, 2014
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The FX8300 motherboard is an Asus M5A97_LE_R20.

It's a very high end motherboard which is worth almost 3 times as much as my intel MSI motherboard and has better features such as USB 3.0, 4 RAM slots instead of only 2 and 6GB/s SATA ports.

As for the processor swap, would I be losing much in terms of gaming? I know that for video editing the FX is better though.

Would you make the trade?
 
Solution
No, I would not. i5-3570k is superior to FX8300.
Motherboard features are not that important.
You can get additional USB 3.0 ports and SATA 6GB/s ports with PCI/PCIE addon cards.

If there are no slots available and you need those features, then consider upgrading only motherboard (not complete system swap).
Where are you getting the value? I'm seeing that AMD board sell for around $50 on eBay. The CPU goes for around $90.

The i5-3570k sells for around $80. Even a cheapo H61 chipset motherboard sells for around $30 a B75 goes for $50 to $90.

These are sold listings on eBay. What people ask and what they get are two entirely different things.

Without knowing which MSI motherboard I could not compare the two.

Given the age I'd consider it too much of a hassle to deal with. Reinstalling Windows and all your software. Potential license issues for Windows and other software. Swapping components between cases. The risk of damaging something. I'm assuming you can overclock the FX 8300 but not the 3570K due to the cheap motherboard. Factoring that in. You'll get what? A 25% boost in single core to quad core tasks and and 25% reduction in heavily threaded tasks.
 

DSzymborski

Curmudgeon Pursuivant
Moderator
I wouldn't do it even if it were, but that's not a high-end motherboard. The normal Asus M5A97 R2.0 was a decent midrange motherboard, but the LE was a cheaper variant with a poor VRM configuration without heatsinks that would occasionally have issues with 125W CPUs at stock, to the extent that when FX CPUs were a thing, it was standard advice to people to make sure it wasn't the LE they were buying.

I don't see the benefit here. *Maybe* for video editing if we were talking an actual 990FX motherboard and top-notching cooling with a realistic hope of an aggressive overclock.
 
No, I would not. i5-3570k is superior to FX8300.
Motherboard features are not that important.
You can get additional USB 3.0 ports and SATA 6GB/s ports with PCI/PCIE addon cards.

If there are no slots available and you need those features, then consider upgrading only motherboard (not complete system swap).
 
Solution