C2D E5300 vs Athlon II x4 620

[jasonb55]

As the subject states; what would be better suited for light to moderate gaming? the C2D E5300 or the Athlon II x4 620? And as a side note, would the Radeon 4870 be a good pair with these chips?

The review on Anandtech said the Athlon isn't suited for gaming, but would it be the better choice over the C2D?


Thanks

 

[manimal]

Well if you already have a lga775 board your answer may be 5300. Some games to use the extra cores like arma 2 gta4 and a few others. If you are building from scratch the 620 is really cheap, overclocks really well and may unlock-only the first few batches do btw-

The extra L3 cache on the B550x2 may help a bit in gaming now but next year you may be happier with a quad. I would go with a 620 now with a good board since the upgrade path is much better am3 side. Do some googling. There are many reviews that will give hard data to your questions....

 

[soccerballtux]

I would go with the quad for the future-- games are going multithreaded; the people say that you should stay with dual core are like the people who said that games won't be dual-threaded for a long time so just get the FX-55 now...well, people did that, and at their words when Oblivion came out.

If you overclock that CPU at all (easy) then you should definitely go with the quad IMO.

 

[cusideabelincoln]

The 620 seems to be the faster gaming chip than the E5300. In AT's review, the 620 beats out the E6300 in gaming tests: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuch...howdoc.aspx?i=3638&p=8

Either chip will work fine with an HD4870.

 

[jasonb55]

Thanks for the replies. I for some odd reason thought that it was a core 2 duo proc. How would a phenom II x3 720 stack up?

 

[cusideabelincoln]

For gaming the 720 would be the fastest of the three processors mentioned.

And the E5300 is based off Core 2 Duo. It just has lower cache, lower FSB, and a different name, but the architecture is basically the same.