Budget PC FX 4100 or Athlon X4 750K

[paco1x]

I need to build a budget PC for average gaming nothing fancy, i already have the Radeon HD 7850 and 8GB DDR3 1600 of RAM.

Since my budget is quite tight, i was thinking in the FX 4100 or the Athlon X4 750K. The FX 6300 could be a better choice, but for the price is out of my budget.

As for the Intel options, the Pentium series doesn't convince me much and the rest of Intel series is out of my range.

I heard good things about the Athlon X4 750K, but dunno maybe the FX 4100 could be better. In my country those CPU mentioned are about almost the same price, the FX 4100 a little more like $10 - $15.

 

[ShintaiDK]

I would pick the 750K of the 2, simply due to the platform.

There is a 760K as well. That should both fit your budget and give you the better platform as well as the highest performance within your budget.

 

[SPBHM]

not a big difference to be honest,
the 750K is based on the newer architecture, but lacks l3 cache and have lower clock,

AM3+ have an upgrade path to the 6xxx-8xxx series,
but with the 750K you can buy some Fm2+ MB (with future Kaveri support), and OC vs OC it shouldn't be much different...

 

[inf64]

Buy FM2+ board with 750K now,OC it. Upgrade to Kaveri based Athlon X4 next year. Profit

 

[Essence_of_War]

Get a 750/760k (whatever's more reasonably priced) Athlon w/ an A75 or higher chipset motherboard.

 

[Rickyyy369]

Go for the 750k and try to get your hands on an FM2+ motherboard so you have an upgrade path to kaveri later on down the road.

 

[blastingcap]

Why not just wait for Kaveri in the first place, if not time-sensitive?

 

[frozentundra123456]

Why not just wait for Kaveri in the first place, if not time-sensitive?

Its probably 3 months at least until Kaveri is available, and nobody knows what the price or performance will be. If trying to game on the igp, it might be worth waiting for, but with a discrete HD7850, I would just go ahead with the Athlon 750k.

 

[Headfoot]

750k and make sure you get a decent enough cooler so you can overclock it

 

[Insert_Nickname]

I'd go with the 750/60K for three reasons:

1. It'll most likely be a cheaper platform then then the FX4100. That means you have some extra budget for your graphics card.
2. The FX4100 is based on the original Bulldozer architecture, with none of the Piledriver updates/fixes.
3. If you get an FM2+ board, you'll have drop in compatibility for Kaveri, that looks to be a decent performance upgrade.

 

[NTMBK]

Definitely go for the 750k, and if you can then buy an FM2+ motherboard.

 

[ChaiBabbaChai]

I don't get the love for the 750k/760k... it's MORE expensive than a 6 core FX CPU and a solid MB. And if you plan on running a discrete vid card, then you don't need the APU junk that comes with FM2+.

I feel like people on this forum just recommend THE NEWEST for no other reason than it's newer... what real benefits does the new thing offer? Honestly.

 

[inf64]

I don't get the love for the 750k/760k... it's MORE expensive than a 6 core FX CPU and a solid MB. And if you plan on running a discrete vid card, then you don't need the APU junk that comes with FM2+.

I feel like people on this forum just recommend THE NEWEST for no other reason than it's newer... what real benefits does the new thing offer? Honestly.

I don't know if you are serious or just joking.
Do you even know what 750K/760K is?
It's the cheapest Trinity/Richland unlocked 4T part available on the market.
750K/760K price on newegg is 80/90$. Price of cheapest FX6300 part is 120$. Motherboard price is comparable and FM2+ boards are maybe even cheaper while offering 2 things AM3+ doesn't: 1)PCIe 3.0 and 2) Kaveri support

So no, 750K/760K is NOT more expensive than FX63xx+motherboard, quite the contrary. And FM2+ offers better feature set.

 

[frozentundra123456]

I don't get the love for the 750k/760k... it's MORE expensive than a 6 core FX CPU and a solid MB. And if you plan on running a discrete vid card, then you don't need the APU junk that comes with FM2+.

I feel like people on this forum just recommend THE NEWEST for no other reason than it's newer... what real benefits does the new thing offer? Honestly.

I don't know how carefully he checked prices, but the op said the fx6300 was out of his price range. I do agree though it is a better choice, but I did not suggest it based on that. It would also be upgradable to an FX 8xxx. As I said, I do not necessarily see the point of upgrading to kaveri if using a discrete card, or at least I would not make it a major factor, since no one knows what the price or CPU performance will be.

Actually if one is budget limited, it makes more sense to try to save up a bit more and get a better cpu now rather than upgrading in a year.

 

[NTMBK]

I don't get the love for the 750k/760k... it's MORE expensive than a 6 core FX CPU and a solid MB. And if you plan on running a discrete vid card, then you don't need the APU junk that comes with FM2+.

I feel like people on this forum just recommend THE NEWEST for no other reason than it's newer... what real benefits does the new thing offer? Honestly.

The 750k is significantly cheaper than the 6300 where I am.

 

[ShintaiDK]

I don't get the love for the 750k/760k... it's MORE expensive than a 6 core FX CPU and a solid MB. And if you plan on running a discrete vid card, then you don't need the APU junk that comes with FM2+.

I feel like people on this forum just recommend THE NEWEST for no other reason than it's newer... what real benefits does the new thing offer? Honestly.

FX6300 is 120$
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819113286

750K is 80$
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819113328

760K is 90$
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819113348

Not to mention the AM3+ platform is horrible outdated.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Motherboard price is comparable and FM2+ boards are maybe even cheaper while offering 2 things AM3+ doesn't: 1)PCIe 3.0 and 2) Kaveri support.

PCIe 3.0 support is conditioned on using a Kaveri APU, Trinity/Richland does NOT support PCIe 3.0.

Just for the record...

 

[NaroonGTX]

Get an FM2+ board, get the Athlon x4 760k, get a CM Hyper 212+ EVO cooler, overclock it and be happy. FM2+ as a platform is better than AM3+ anyway, and four cores is all you need for gaming.

The 760k itself is a better chip than the FX-4100 in every way possible. The lack of L3 cache means nothing since the L3 cache in the FX chips had terrible latencies, and benches showed no tangible perf gains for the FX chips over the APU variants clock-for-clock.

 

[SPBHM]

Get an FM2+ board, get the Athlon x4 760k, get a CM Hyper 212+ EVO cooler, overclock it and be happy. FM2+ as a platform is better than AM3+ anyway, and four cores is all you need for gaming.

The 760k itself is a better chip than the FX-4100 in every way possible. The lack of L3 cache means nothing since the L3 cache in the FX chips had terrible latencies, and benches showed no tangible perf gains for the FX chips over the APU variants clock-for-clock.

I'm not so sure, a few games show the benefit of extra cores and the 6300-8300 should be better (think Battlefield MP64 and this kind of game), as for the l3, the 4300 have 4MB of l3 cache (compared to 8MB from the 6300-8300 and 4100), and I'm not sure you can claim this difference http://anandtech.com/bench/product/675?vs=700 (bottom of the page is gaming) is only because of that but... in any case the 4100 is slower per clock, but the 750K is lower clocked... as I said I think it would be around the same... having the possibility to upgrade to a 3-4 module CPU would be nice, as would be the possibility of Kaveri, but... we don't have any good data regarding the CPU performance gains from Kaveri (IGP is irrelevant for him I think), but something else to consider is, an adequate (great VRMs etc) MB for a 8 core FX also costs more...

so I would agree with most here that perhaps a cheap FM2+ board + the X4 is a very nice choice... and the 4100 and AM3+ in general is to outdated.

 

[ChaiBabbaChai]

Get an FM2+ board, get the Athlon x4 760k, get a CM Hyper 212+ EVO cooler, overclock it and be happy. FM2+ as a platform is better than AM3+ anyway, and four cores is all you need for gaming.

The 760k itself is a better chip than the FX-4100 in every way possible. The lack of L3 cache means nothing since the L3 cache in the FX chips had terrible latencies, and benches showed no tangible perf gains for the FX chips over the APU variants clock-for-clock.

That's good info. Any links?

When I was looking last night for a quick sec, it appeared that the FM2+ boards were more pricey than an equivalent AM3+ and the extra APU stuff was just stuff you'd be paying extra $ to sit there looking pretty. So, by the time you get a board and CPU, it's about the same I guess... for less cores.

 

[ShintaiDK]

That's good info. Any links?

When I was looking last night for a quick sec, it appeared that the FM2+ boards were more pricey than an equivalent AM3+ and the extra APU stuff was just stuff you'd be paying extra $ to sit there looking pretty. So, by the time you get a board and CPU, it's about the same I guess... for less cores.

We already covered than the FM2 CPU is 30-40$ cheaper. The boards cost around the same as well. And AM3+ is a 4 year old platform. No need to penalize yourself further buying that.

Even the FX 4300 cost 110$ vs the 90$ for the 760K.

Just take a look at newegg.com.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Even the FX 4300 cost 110$ vs the 90$ for the 760K.

If you decide to go AM3+, you should at least make sure you get an FX x3xx CPU. They use the improved Piledriver core, that is slightly faster then the original Bulldozer used in the x1xx's.

I'll have to agree with Shintai though, the AM3+ is a 4 year old platform, and quite dead going forward. As in Steamroller on AM3+ is not going to happen...

 

[NTMBK]

That's good info. Any links?

When I was looking last night for a quick sec, it appeared that the FM2+ boards were more pricey than an equivalent AM3+ and the extra APU stuff was just stuff you'd be paying extra $ to sit there looking pretty. So, by the time you get a board and CPU, it's about the same I guess... for less cores.

The 61XX series is based on Bulldozer. These cores have noticeably lower performance per clock than the 63XX series which is based on Piledriver.

Take a look at this comparison of an 8150 and an 8320: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/434?vs=698 Despite the Piledriver part being 100MHz slower, it beats its predecessor in almost every single benchmark.

The considerably poorer performance per clock of BD means that I would rule out buying any 41XX or 61XX processors, and only compare the FM2 Athlons with Piledriver parts.

Now let's do a little price comparison.

FM2+:

Athlon 760K £62.24
Biostar Hi-Fi A88S3+ £56.99
Total cost: £119.23

AM3+:


Gigabyte GA-78LMT-S2 £34.43
FX-6300 £85.32
Total cost: £119.75

So for roughly the same money, you get a motherboard with an ancient chipset (760G) which has no support for SATA-III and no USB3. There are boards which cost a few pounds more and have USB3 support, but the cheapest one I can see which supports SATA-III is this one, at almost double the price. And while you get more CPU cores, you also get them at a lower clock speed.

The reason that some AM3+ boards are so cheap is because they are completely terrible. They are just 5 year old AM2+ motherboards with a handful of adjustments to turn them into AM3+ motherboards, with the exact same 700-series chipset. I wouldn't recommend buying a bargain basement AM3+ motherboard to anybody in 2013, because they're 2008 motherboards with a new badge on it. If you want a good user experience, get an FM2+ motherboard with a 6GB/s SSD.

 

[ChaiBabbaChai]

I wouldn't buy either of those motherboards, and yes I would get the FX-6300 over the FX-6100, as I did in the last build I did for a friend on a budget.

The board for the FX-6300 is http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128627 not a bad or bargain basement board... just something for gaming that is simple, quality and with up-to-date features. It doesn't have to be garbage just because it's last years tech. That's my point. FM2+ is great for HTPC or small builds that require onboard graphics.

 

[cbn]

760K is 90$
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819113348

Link is broken, but 760K is $77 shipped on Amazon--> http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00D7BYMB2/...xtension-kb-20