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Which CPU would be better?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Productcompare.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007671 600213780&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&CompareItemList=343|19-103-962^19-103-962-TS%2C19-113-287^19-113-287-TS&percm=19-103-962%3A%24%24%24%24%24%24%24%3B19-113-287%3A%24%24%24%24%24%24%24
They are both priced the same. I'm basically building a cheap gaming system for my son. Which of these would be the better buy?
Comments
The FX-6100 is faster in programs that scale well to six cores, while the FX-4300 is faster in games that can't put more than four cores to good use. So basically, it depends.
But you really shouldn't choose a processor in isolation without considering anything else in the system. What's your budget, and what other parts are you looking at?
I'd typically recommend either paying the extra $20 to get an FX-6300 (best of both worlds as compared to the two above; rather than four faster cores or six slower ones, you get six faster cores) or else saving a lot of money by going with an A10-5800K and integrated graphics.
I just finished my build and basically building him a lesser version of what I have. Honestly I don't want to spend over 700 for his build. Here is what I will be ordering soon.
ASUS M5A97 R2.0 AM3+ AMD 970 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX
Rosewill CHALLENGER Black Gaming ATX Mid Tower
Seagate Barracuda ST500DM002 500GB 7200 RPM
SAMSUNG DVD Burner 24X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 8X DVD+R
CORSAIR XMS 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600
MSI R7870-2GD5T/OC Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition 2GB 256bit
RAIDMAX HYBRID 2 RX-630SS 630W ATX12V
I have the AMD FX-6300 Vishera 3.5GHz build into the price and it all comes out to $703
Only difference I have in my build is I have a FX-8300 and a HIS IceQ 7870 for overclocking along with a 1tb drive and 1866 ram. I also have a much better Thermaltake PSU in my system as well.
But like I said.. it's for my son and he just needs something better than his old pc he has now.
Also these systems are just starters as eventually I will upgrade to more ram, better video card and SSD.
That power supply comes with an awful lot of red flags, ranging from a complete lack of 80 PLUS certification to not telling you how much of that 630 W is on the +12 V rail to saying that the +3.3 V, +5 V, and +12 V rails all added together come to less than the claimed nominal wattage.
Thermaltake may or may not be any better, as some of theirs are decent while others are junk. Most of them are rather overpriced, though.
Fortunately, you can get something markedly better (than the Raidmax power supply, at least) for only $4 more:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817207013
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On your budget, I'd say to definitely get at least an FX-6300. If you decide to upgrade a video card later, it's easy to replace just the video card. If you decide that you need to upgrade the processor later, you'll likely have to choose between buying something that you could have bought today for not much less than it would have cost today and replacing the processor, motherboard, memory, and OS license. If it's a question of budget and you need to make room, then it's pretty easy to cut back some on the video card.
Also, it can be a pain to add an SSD later, as you want the OS on the SSD. If you've got 200 GB of stuff on your hard drive and want to add a 120 GB SSD later, you can't just copy everything from the hard drive onto the SSD. A complete reinstall will do the trick, but then you're stuck reinstalling all of your programs, which is a major pain.
I suspect that planning ahead by partitioning the hard drive into one drive for "stuff that would go on the SSD if you had it" and another drive for "stuff that would go on the hard drive even if you had an SSD" would make it so that you could later copy one drive of hard drive contents onto the SSD. But I haven't tried that, so I don't know exactly how it would work.
Would a 550 be enough power though? I'm sure he's going to want to upgrade the video card within the next 6 months to something more powerful.
For the same price I could get this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182200
......?
http://cpuboss.com/cpus/AMD-FX-6100-vs-AMD-FX-4300
http://img818.imageshack.us/img818/8049/crydex.png
Well, all the CPU's being considered are 95W TDP - and we'll just say no overclock for the moment.
100W for hard drives, case fans, and motherboard/RAM/etc.
With a good quality 550W power supply, that leaves you with 355W for a video card.
No single-slot single-GPU video card uses more than 300W.
A good 550W will run basically any CPU with any single-GPU video card with a typical computer setup (less than 4 case fans, less than 3 hard drives/SSDs total, etc), but have no room for any overclocking.
That CPUBoss site is interesting.
If all I had to choose from were a 4300 and a 6100, and there were no other options available and everything else were equal (same price, etc)... I'd go with the 4300, because the single core performance is stronger, and not many programs can utilize more than 4 cores in the first place, and probably won't for the useful life of these processors anyway.
And all that being said, if I could choose anything and were only constrained by my budget, I'd go with the 6300 - best of both worlds for very little more money.
Get a good PSU from the start. It might save you trouble with the system later which can include damage to other hardware. A good 550w PSU is plenty for most systems. I use a 550w seasonic gold in both my systems and they do just fine. Even with the OC on my PSU and GPU. Nothing extreme in the OC tho.
You may want to consider buying the SSD first and adding the HDD later instead of the other way around. If he can get by with a 120g SSD for a few months then thats what I would do.
Its a helluva lot easier to add an HDD storage drive later than adding an SSD and having to install OS or try and transfer an OS onto an SSD.
There's no need to worry about file transfer from the HDD to the SSD once u get it, if u prepare beforehand, like Quizzical said just partition the hard drive at the start of installation and prepare for the file transfer.
The way i do it is, i make a partition for the Windows, and then a partition for everything else(a storage partition of sorts). Best option for you would be to make a 50-60GB partition for windows and only install basic programs there, and make sure u dont install any large programs or games, and then make second partition for most important games and programs u would want to move or reinstall to the SSD, and a 3rd storage partition for random stuff like e-books movies, game installation files, etc, ...
This way u are sure that when u do get the SSD u can just format the partition on which your windows is located, so that u dont have any conflicts and problems with the old installation, and just keep all the other data because it is on seperate partitions.
I can vouch for this because, i've been using this method for about 5 years now, and i am still running games and programs on windows 7 x64 installation from an windows XP installation from 7 years ago, for instance I've kept the same installation of warcraft 3:frozen throne and diablo II for 7 years and i've run it in 3 windows xp installations, 2 windows vista installations, and 3 windows 7 installations without a problem.
Don't get too caught up in nominal wattage ratings. That's a marketing number, not an engineering one. There isn't any objective test that one can run to determine the wattage of an arbitrary power supply. Rather, the ratings are the company's promise that if you don't pull more than this much power, everything will work and stay in spec. The problem is that some companies lie. See this, for example:
http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Story4&reid=335
A "550 W" power supply died when he tried to pull 422 W from it. There's a good chance that it would have died at a substantially lower wattage, too. And that's when brand new; it gets worse once it has some wear and tear on it.
It's a pretty safe bet that the XFX 550 W that I linked can deliver more power while staying in spec than the Raidmax 630 W that you were looking at. More likely than not, it can deliver more than the Rosewill Green 630 W, too, as that comes with some red flags of its own. Also, the Rosewill Green costs $21 more before rebate, or $36 more after rebate, so I don't see how that qualifies as "the same price".
If that happens, you're lucky if the power supply is the only thing that dies. A $20 power supply that fries $500 in other hardware was not a good bargain.
While all this may be true. I personally would rather take the easier route and start off with the SSD. Adding an HDD later for storage is about a 5 minute process and is simply plugging the hardware in basically. Never understood the whole " lets buy an HDD that costs the same as an SSD and transfer everything later"
Screw that. Go with a little less storage/space up front and not have to worry about any file / os transfer later. Thats what i would do at least
This is the PSU I have in my curent system.. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153173
I'd like to think I know a decent amount about hardware but honestly know very little about PSUs.
I'll go with the 550 that you posted Quiz, thank you. And thank you all for the help.
I am having one slight problem with my PC though, maybe I can throw that out there and see if you guys would know a solution. I haven't messed with any wattage or anything for my ram yet. But, anyhow it's supposed to go to 1866 without overlocking. Once I got my system to post I changed it to 1866 from the 1600 that it automatically set it to.
This is the ram I have btw. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231460
Now it won't post at 1866, in fact once I manually reboot the system the options for speed completely change. The speed I can choose that is closest to 1866 is 1733 at which speed it runs fine. Why is this occuring?
That power supply is decent but not great. It's surely a lot better than the Raidmax one you were looking at. It's not what I'd buy new, but if you already have it, I don't see any reason to replace it it unless you have reason to suspect that that particular unit is defective or some such.
Memory timings are in numbers of clock cycles. Higher clock speeds mean lower real-world latencies (in nanoseconds) corresponding to the same timing numbers (in clock cycles). It's likely that your motherboard will default to something conservative like 1333 MHz and 9-9-9-24. If you only change that to 1866 MHz while leaving the timings alone, then trying to run the memory below the rated timings of 9-10-9-28 could easily cause problems. Make sure that you set the memory timings to the rated values, and don't just change the clock speed alone. Lower timings => lower real-world latency => better performance, but may crash if memory can't handle it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_timings
Check your BIOS and see what the four main memory timings are set to. I don't know exactly what your BIOS will call them, but you can probably figure it out from matching names in that article. If they're set to something below 9-10-9-28, then that's probably what's stopping the memory from working properly at 1866 MHz.
amd is cool but
you'd be better off with an i3
http://www.amazon.com/Corsair-Enthusiast-Certified-Compatible-platforms/dp/B004LB5AZY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1364326300&sr=8-1&keywords=650watt+power+supply
This is what I build in a midrange pc..
That's very old, and not what you want today, especially at $80. While I wouldn't have criticized that power supply choice 6 years ago, there aren't many 6+ year old parts that I'd buy new today.
When cost is the driving factor, Intel COre i3's ($130-$150US on average depending on stock clock) run about $10-$30 more than an FX6300 or 4300 ($140 and $120US on average), but you also have to factor in motherboard, which AMD motherboards are usually about $25-50 cheaper again than similar Intel motherboards. So your looking at saving around $30-$70 total, for not a huge difference in performance. On a sub-$700 budget, that's huge.
Plus your looking at more total cores on an AMD (4-6, I won't really compare the 8, versus the i3 2+2 hyperthreading on any desktop i3), which doesn't do much for now, but may help increase the longevity. And add in overclocking - Core i3's are locked, AMDs are not, and on a budget system Overclocking can be used to stretch that budget a good deal further, but isn't for everyone (particularly novices).
I don't have anything against an i3, but your paying a steep Intel tax there.
Anandtech real world benchmarks:
http://anandtech.com/bench/Product/700?vs=677
Pretty much back and forth for a FX-4300 vs i3 3220
I'd post the comparison of the FX6300 to the 3240 but they don't have complete marks for the 3240, and the 6300 compared to the 3220 looks as you expect them too: nearly the same for primarily single-threaded applications, and a clear beatdown on stuff that can scale upwards on core count.
Two cores for the price of six, you say? What could possibly go wrong?
An Ivy Bridge Core i3 is a little faster than an FX-6300 in single-threaded performance. But only a little. And six slightly slower cores will completely swamp two slightly faster cores if you can put several cores to good use. If you scale well to six cores, the FX-6300 might well double the performance of a Core i3-3220.
Today, you likely wouldn't notice much difference in most games. But games are pretty easy to scale to as many CPU cores as you care to (at least within reason, like 6 or 8, not 100), and the only reasons for a game not to scale to that many cores are:
1) something else (e.g., the video card) is the bottleneck before you need that much CPU performance,
2) the game is very old, and was coded before people realized that multi-core was the future,
3) the game doesn't need much CPU performance and runs very well even on one or two relatively slow cores, or
4) the programmers are completely incompetent.
But (2) and (3) should run well on just about anything you buy today, (1) means that the CPU isn't the issue anyway, and (4) will probably cause much bigger problems than poor CPU core scaling.
What happens in a few years when game programmers are comfortable assuming that everyone has at least a quad core and they aren't particularly bothered if a dual core processor can't run the game? Then you'll be looking to replace that Core i3 already, while an FX-6300 will still have years of useful life in it.
Something else to consider as well.
Do some research on the games you will play. Look at their forums. See what players are running and what seems to be best.
For example, if you plan to play GW2 (It's the only example I know of at this time, but it's out there)
There are threads in GW2 forums advocating using Intel over AMD. They say the game is just not optimized well for AMD so this program wil function better on a lesser Intel CPU than on a better AMD CPU.
At least that was the sentiment going around back when it released. I honeslty can't say it's still that way. But it still makes sense to do some research.
I have an Intel chip so I didn't follow this very closely, but I rememebr reading about it.
While it is true that if you take an Intel CPU and an AMD CPU that perform about as well on average, Guild Wars 2 will probably run better on the Intel CPU, that's only if you're comparing two processors that run about as well on average. And an FX-6300 does not run about as well on average as a Core i3-3220.
To take a video card comparison, a Radeon HD 7850 will beat a GeForce GTX 660 in some games and lose to it in others. (Actually, it will lose to the GTX 660 in most games, but they're fairly close.) But it won't often beat a GeForce GTX 680 even in a game very favorable to AMD, nor will it often lose to a GeForce GTX 650 even in a game very favorable to Nvidia. Games that favor one architecture over another may shift performance by 20% as compared to what you'd expect on average, but they won't often mean that a part that is normally three times as fast suddenly loses outright.