What is the Differece: AMD Athlon X4 860k vs Intel Core i5-6600K

watrhous

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Nov 27, 2013
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Can someone please have mercy on me and explain or help me understand the justification for the giant price gap between these 2 processors...

AMD Athlon X4 860k ....vs.... Intel Core i5-6600K

I do not pretend to know anything about them except whats on the surface, for example,

Both are quad cores, but the AMD runs at higher GHz, is approximately $150-200 cheaper ... So what am i missing here that the intel has. Is it a OC capability (which I know little of) or is it reputation or just the intel hood ornament? Does it have something to do with the skylake thing?

A little background, I have used the AMD on a previous bargain build for a friend and I have the i5 on my personal box which I am quite happy with both.
 
Solution
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I totally disagree with that. Other than an APU with no plans of discreet graphics there is almost no justification to buy an AMD CPU today. An i3 6100 handily beats an overclocked FX 8xxx chip is almost all gaming situations. And the AMD chip needs a high quality motherboard and aftermarket cooling to be able to compete at all.

delaro

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Core vs Core performance. The current Intel offerings are close to 30% more powerful over the best AMD has to offer. AMD is still great for budget builds but anyone that is a power user... Max settings @ 60+Fps is going to want Intel.
 
Yuge.

The i5 has a much higher IPC (instructions per clock), which make each of its cores much stronger than the Athlon, despite running at lower speed. This means both higher single-threaded performance (good for some games, faster web browsing, faster OS tasks, etc), and higher multithreaded performance as well (video conversion, most modern games, etc).

TLDR version: the i5 is much faster for the increased price. If you don't intend to overclock, go for the i5-6500 and a B or H-series motherboard. It will save you a bit of $$$ for similar performance.
 

Dunlop0078

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Well you are basing performance solely on core count and core frequency, which doesn't even remotely tell the whole story. Per core the 6600k is roughly twice as fast as the 860k maybe more. Its a much newer, much faster architecture. Look at these bf1 benchmarks, see the duel core i3 beating out the 8 Core amd fx 8370 by quite a bit? Core count can sometimes be nothing more than a number.

bf1-cpu-benchmark-dx11.png
 

wildfire707

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There are many differences between the two CPUs. For current AMD processors, the "cores" are built with two sharing a module. Each module has one floating point core shared between two integer cores. Most software is not optimized for this (and usually cannot be optimized), so only one half of the cores can be used. This means that you have to take the core count on AMD CPUs and divide it by two to compare it against Intel CPUs. So an AMD X4 compares well against Pentium dual core CPUs. You also have to remember that the speed rating of the CPUs does not equal performance. The Intel CPUs are usually more efficient, so the AMD ones need to be clocked faster to perform the same.

So basically an overclocked AMD FX 8350 (eight "cores") performs a little less than an Intel i5 6500 (four cores) and it performs better than an Intel i3 6300 (two cores with hyperthreading).

Good luck!
 
In a word, efficiency. It's easy to list frequency on a spec sheet (the number in GHz) but that doesn't define real-world speed. To be sure the frequency is one important contributor but not every chip does as much work at the same frequency in an equal amount of time. This is what a previous poster means by IPC. This is where Intel has kicked AMD's butt in the past few years.

The word "skylake" is just Intel's codename for the sixth generation Core family. The upcoming seventh will be "kaby lake."
 
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Deleted member 217926

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I totally disagree with that. Other than an APU with no plans of discreet graphics there is almost no justification to buy an AMD CPU today. An i3 6100 handily beats an overclocked FX 8xxx chip is almost all gaming situations. And the AMD chip needs a high quality motherboard and aftermarket cooling to be able to compete at all.
 
Solution


Try 70-100% (IPC).
 

LeKeiser

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you made me laugh hard, thanx :)
 
While normally we disagree, I'm going to side with LeKeiser here. The problem with an FX-83xx isn't that it performs worse than an i3, generally. They trade blows, and cost close to the same. You can use an FX with a ~$50 board; chances are you're not going to be able to overclock it, but you can't OC the i3 either. You only really NEED an aftermarket cooler if you're overclocking, too.

The problem with the FX's is that there's not a whole lot of strong points in their favor. They're on a dead-end socket, perform about the same as similarly-priced Intel chips while drawing more power and producing more heat. They're not a great choice for a from-scratch, but they do alright with modern workloads. A Core i3 is very rarely an upgrade from an FX 8 core CPU unless you're looking to lower power and go SFF, rather than for performance.
 
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Deleted member 217926

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There are 11 benchmarks on this page.

http://www.techspot.com/review/1087-best-value-desktop-cpu/page4.html

In the interest of not clogging this thread up with images I'll post the single instance an FX 8320E overclocked to 4.6Ghz beats an i3 6100 in. :)

23wwjt2.jpg


The other 10 look like this.

2h4lu1u.jpg



Notice my first post said for gaming.