The FX8350 is awful. But should I wait to get DDR4 before changing CPU?

[TomRL]

My PC is having trouble taking the strain that this superhot super-inefficient beast is putting it under. It's British Summetime, temperatures are high, the PC fan is going like crazy and it only takes a few Chrome tabs and a game to get the CPU usage between 50%-70%, which send the fans into a craze.
I've heard and have seen some benchmarks that suggest that even an I3 out-performs the FX8350 in games, and it would offer a way lower power draw and heat output. But should I wait and upgrade my mobo, ram and cpu to DDR4? I'd rather not. I'd rather get a pre-Skylake i5 and keep that for as long as possible, but I'm concerned that I might be left in the dust in a future where it's DDR4 or bust.

 

[Evil Mastermind]

Maybe try to disable some cores maybe that would help or "under clock", if you need go get skylake because its gonna be only few % behind the kaby lake and few % higher than zen.

 

[utroz]

Any change to an Intel cpu will require a different motherboard at the very least. What are you using for a heatsink on your FX-8350? Also do you have case fans, and if so how many? Also an i3 may beat the FX-8350 in games that use only a few threads at most but in multitasking the FX-8350 should be faster so if you do switch to intel I would get an i5 of some sort so you see a substantial boost in all workloads. Are you running stock clocks?

 

[TomRL]

I think I have at least three case fans. I have no idea what the heatsink is, it's just the one that came with the PC, nothing special I don't think :S
I'm not overclocking the CPU either.
If I find a way of keeping the temps down and the fans quiet, would the 8350 still last me ok as a gaming CPU?

 

[utroz]

So I will say that stock coolers tend to really suck. Like really badly. They are the bare minimum under best case conditions for FX cpus. You could look into a much better after market heatsink and cooler that can make a world of difference in cooling which will keep the fans from spinning up and sounding like a jet. What are you cpu temps? You can use AOD (AMD Overdrive) to get the most accurate temps from a FX cpu or something like HWMonitor which gives fairly close temps for your cpu. You see your system might be set in the bios to keep the cpu as cool as possible at the expense of fan noise. You could use AIDIA 64 and do a stability test to see what the temps and the fan RPM's are under a worse possible case load. Also is your PC a brand name one or is it one that is build by a local system builder (it didn't sound like you built it)?

 

[TomRL]

Are there likely to be compatibility issues with third party coolers or do I not need to worry about it fitting on the CPU?
It was built by DinoPC.com
The current temps are 43 degrees C. That doesn't seem too bad but I'm running very light with only chrome and Steam app open.

 

[utroz]

You would just need to make sure it is AM3+ compatible, also use some decent thermal grease/paste, oh and that it is not too large to fit in your motherboard and case configuration. What are your systems specs?

 

[TomRL]

AMD FX-8350
AMD R7 260
8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 799MHz
Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. GA-78LMT-USB3 (Socket M2) 31 °C
650 watt corsair PSU

 

[synphul]

Any cpu change is likely going to require ddr4 and a new motherboard. There's nothing else to upgrade to (worthwhile anyway) on the current setup. Intel's latest platform is socket 1151, skylake with ddr4. Amd's new cpu's coming out toward end of year, zen, will be am4 and also ddr4. Take your pick, either now or later it's going to mean a new motherboard + ddr4 whether you go with intel or amd.

You're right, haswell still uses ddr3. Future setups will be ddr4 so if you plan to have a desktop pc in the future you'll eventually end up with ddr4. The question is whether to keep the ddr3 now and buy ddr4 in the future or buy the ddr4 now and you'll have it to reuse in the future. As cheap as ram prices are I doubt they'll be getting a whole lot cheaper.

They could even end up more expensive down the road. No way of knowing when things like storms take out manufacturing plants and cause a shortage of supply driving prices up like it did with hard drives a few years back when both wd and seagate's big plants got hit. Hard disk prices went through the roof overnight. Not saying the sky is falling just that there's no way to predict anything. For a long time ddr2 was pretty affordable, then prices went up. Ddr3 prices were up for quite awhile as well and they've gotten quite a bit cheaper the past year or so.

Something like a cryorig h7 or cm 212 evo would be a decent upgrade to the stock cooler, it would help with temps for the time being. Whether you need to upgrade or not only you know and depends on whether or not your system is performing as well as you need it to.