CPU advice

jawali

Hello all,

I need to buy new CPU (as well as motherboard and psu) soon and need some opinions. I am thinking about AMD FX-8120 black edition (or fx-6100 be)  and i5-2500k. Some other  parts will be taken from my old pc: radeon sapphire 5850 (I will replace it with AMD 6950 or something similar in several months), 1TB Caviar Black. This computer will be used for some programming (visual basic), games (mostly mmo and Skyrim), movies and internet browsing.

As I stated before I am not sure if I should go for FX- 8120 or i5-2500k (both have same price) or maybe try FX-6100. When I looked at FX reviews it seems that this cpu has great potential (for example very good 3D mark 2011 score) but somehow it sucks  in most games having 15-20 fps less (but anyway it doesn't matter much to me if I have 100 fps or 80)

Do you think that its performance will change with new Windows 8 or when games start to use all cores (so good cpu for the near future) or bulldozer took an arrow in the knee and it is better to stick with i5?

thx for advices

greetings and happy new year to all!!!!

 

Quizzical

If it's for gaming, then get a Core i5 2500K.  If it's for some purpose that can put all eight cores to good use, then get an FX-8150.  Basically, eight slower cores beat four faster ones in programs that scale well to eight cores.  Four faster cores beat eight slower cores if you can't use more than four cores anyway.  Gaming goes in the latter category.

Note that the FX-8150 is somewhat slower than it will be in the future, because Windows doesn't know what to do with AMD's Bulldozer architecture yet.  Microsoft is working on it, and actually released a hotfix to improve Bulldozer performance, but then pulled it shortly thereafter.  Once Microsoft is satisfied that it's working, maybe the FX-8150 will be "only" 20% slower than a Core i5 2500K in single-threaded programs, rather than about 30% slower as it is today.  That's an improvement, but for gaming purposes, you probably want at most 0% slower, and that's not going to happen.

Classicstar

Dont count on windows 8 yet and wait for while, we all know the vista blunder and i say win7 is for while perfect and very good OS.

Win8 so far they tested agains win7 and they say its little faster at least start up is alot faster only littlebit with games so far but win8 core isbuild around mobile devices and im affraid desktop will be after thought.

And im not very convinced with these test being reliable, its way to early to tell if win8 is next best thing they all always say this bah:(

Ridelynn

By and large for games, expanding past some magic optimal number of cores does not translate to better performance.

Most games are programming to only use 1 or 2 cores, a small few go out to 3 or 4. I can count on one hand the number of games that can use any cores past that.

The AMD line is great if you need real physical cores. 6 or 8 cores on a die is a good number to have, but only if you have software that can effectively use them. THat's why they look great on benchmarks - benchmark programs can use them. Real video games generally can't.

Intel has faster per-core performance, in large part because of better energy management (Intel's TurboBoost is a lot better than AMD"s Turbo Core).

For gaming, the Intel is the best bet. AMD has the budget option with the Phenom II lineup, the Bulldozer doesn't even really come into the equation for a gaming rig: the price vs. performance just doesn't compete well. You could get a quad core Phenom II X4, use a mild over clock, and see almost identical performance as you would with the FX-8120, use the same motherboard and peripherals, and save yourself about $125, or just get the Intel 2500 for about the same price as you would have paid for the FX-8120 and choose a different motherboard.

The current Windows 8 developer edition is showing between a 4-10% improvement in Bulldozer performance, I don't think that's enough to really make it competitive with the Sandy Bridge architecture, and certainly not at the same price point.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/the-bulldozer-review-amd-fx8150-tested/11

BigCaliGuru

I enjoy threads such as this one. Im also building a New Gaming rig soon, and this Info helps alot. Thank OP and all others.