convert to haswell, or stick it out with AMD?

[Spawne32]

So roughly 3-4 months ago, I finally got back into the PC building game after being out of it content with my intel system for 4 years after core2duo was released. Never really dabbled in the i7 or i5 market with intel because price was always a deciding factor at the time and intel never really was cost effective no matter how you stacked it. AMD on the other hand, despite being incredibly cheap, didnt really show any significant gains over what I already had with the core2 system I was on.

So finally after all this time, doing my research I settled on AMD this time around again, price was great from a CPU standpoint, I was able to get one of AMD's highest end 8 core processors, the 8320 vishera at a very reasonably priced 149.99. This, paired up with my passion for using silverstone mATX cases (in this case the TJ08-E) I put together the following system...

AMD FX-8320
Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3
Crucial Ballistix Elite 8GB DDR3-1600
Western Digital 1TB WD10EZEX RAID0
Corsair H60
CORSAIR CX500M 500W MODULAR
Windows 7 x64

and this thing flew like a bat out of hell compared to my old intel system, which got passed down to my mom as an upgrade to her aging ITX system I built for her many years ago.

So this month I decided to upgrade my graphics card from my HD6850 since I have been playing guild wars 2 for quite some time now (with no issues with the 6850 mind you). I got a killer deal on a 7870ghz edition from MSI on newegg. So i got the car, installed it, and realized...I wasnt really seeing any real gain in performance, maybe 5% on average FPS increase, and the settings had already been set to max on the 6850 anyway.

Then i realized, this was not uncommon for people running AMD systems, mainly because of the fact that the areas I was seeing low FPS were because they were CPU heavy areas (areas of the MMO with alot of players). I also realized I was suffering from two major bottlenecks now, at the motherboard itself. I now realized that I shot myself in the foot going mATX (because thats what i love vs the bulky full atx systems). This gigabyte board, not only runs only PCI-E 2.0, when the graphics card is PCI-E 3.0, but im stuck running my SATA3 drives in SATA2 mode because the motherboard doesnt support it.

Now comes the difficult question. Do i stick it out with AMD in the hopes to see a 9xx series chipset make its way to mATX? Or do i jump ship to intel with the haswell release, and get a lower performing processor and pay more money, just to relieve the bottle neck at the motherboard?

Because of the pricing of the intel processors, id be stuck in the "Core i5-4430 Haswell 3.0GHz" area, between 175-200 dollars. And for all intents and purposes, these processors are not going to be on par with the 8320 oc'ed to 4ghz stable. (based on reviews ive seen) and will pail in comparison in multi-threaded performance.

What is everyone's opinion on this dilemma?

 

[buklau]

First thing I'd do is to uninstall your AMD video driver, and download/reinstall the latest 13.11 beta 9.5 from amd.com to make sure it's not a software issue. Second thing I'd do is try to overclock your fx8320 to 4ghz without touching vcore due to your 4+1 matx board (125w max). This may help relief any bottleneck you have in CPU intensive games.

 

[nwo]

PIC-e 3.0 and 2.0 is not going to be a noticeable difference when you are running a single 7870.

Same goes with SATA 3 and SATA 2. Most current SATA 3 drives are not fast enough to saturate the SATA 2 interface, especially if you are talking about a HDD.

Your motherboard is not bottlenecking anything. Your CPU is begging for you to overclock it! Once you get it to about 4GHz you shouldn't have too much trouble gaming.

Not sure what CPU you had before, but 6850 to a 7870 is not really a huge upgrade. Maybe like a 20-30% real world performance increase, which is not really that significant depending on which games you play.

 

[TerryMathews]

Here's my $0.02:

PCIe 2.0/3.0 and SATA 2/3 is a non-issue for what you're looking at. You are correct that you have a bottleneck, but that isn't it.

You are seeing lag in CPU intensive areas because the AMD chip, when compared to it's Intel counterparts, is made up of a larger number of less efficient execution units. Games or applications that are truly optimized for the AMD multi-core can realize a significant performance gain but I would hazard a guess that the game you are playing is using 1-2 threads tops; that is what most of mine do.

You may also be seeing a compounding problem in that there isn't really a MATX board for AM3+ that correctly supports the higher TDP chips like the 8320. They all list that they "support" it and technically that is true however you are limited especially if you overclock because of that 4 phase VRM system. If you look at the 9xx chipsets, most of them are 8 phase and for good reason as the 83xx chips often exceed 125W TDP at stock, let alone overclocked.

If gaming is your goal and you're not satisfied with what you have, swapping to an i5 4670k would be a prudent move. If you're comfortable overclocking, hitting 4.5-4.6 seems to be realistic given proper cooling and a good motherboard.

Also just an FYI: that Corsair H60 isn't going to cut it. Just had to pull it from my 4770k rig. Was throttling within 30 seconds during synthetic benchmarks. Noctua NH-D14? All day long no throttle.

 

[escrow4]

That mobo is too gimped to support much of an OC. If you do buy a new mobo may as well go Haswell, and sell off the FX for a small part of the price. I'd avoid the lowest end i5, the clock speeds are just too low, and being locked, you are stuck with it. You'd want a 4570 minimum. And yes, 6850 -> to 7870 is pretty so so. A 7950 would have been a stronger upgrade.

 

[Spawne32]

First thing I'd do is to uninstall your AMD video driver, and download/reinstall the latest 13.11 beta 9.5 from amd.com to make sure it's not a software issue. Second thing I'd do is try to overclock your fx8320 to 4ghz without touching vcore due to your 4+1 matx board (125w max). This may help relief any bottleneck you have in CPU intensive games.

Ill give this a try and see if its a conflict issue, but this CPU is already overclocked to 4ghz stable. Biggest issue I had with this board though was that the vdroop was insane, mostly because of the fact that like you guys said, the board doesnt support it well. Even with LLC set to max I was seeing massive voltage drops. So the voltage is actually a little bit higher then what I wanted to run to keep it stable at 4ghz under full load.

Here's my $0.02:

PCIe 2.0/3.0 and SATA 2/3 is a non-issue for what you're looking at. You are correct that you have a bottleneck, but that isn't it.

You are seeing lag in CPU intensive areas because the AMD chip, when compared to it's Intel counterparts, is made up of a larger number of less efficient execution units. Games or applications that are truly optimized for the AMD multi-core can realize a significant performance gain but I would hazard a guess that the game you are playing is using 1-2 threads tops; that is what most of mine do.

You may also be seeing a compounding problem in that there isn't really a MATX board for AM3+ that correctly supports the higher TDP chips like the 8320. They all list that they "support" it and technically that is true however you are limited especially if you overclock because of that 4 phase VRM system. If you look at the 9xx chipsets, most of them are 8 phase and for good reason as the 83xx chips often exceed 125W TDP at stock, let alone overclocked.

If gaming is your goal and you're not satisfied with what you have, swapping to an i5 4670k would be a prudent move. If you're comfortable overclocking, hitting 4.5-4.6 seems to be realistic given proper cooling and a good motherboard.

Also just an FYI: that Corsair H60 isn't going to cut it. Just had to pull it from my 4770k rig. Was throttling within 30 seconds during synthetic benchmarks. Noctua NH-D14? All day long no throttle.

That mobo is too gimped to support much of an OC. If you do buy a new mobo may as well go Haswell, and sell off the FX for a small part of the price. I'd avoid the lowest end i5, the clock speeds are just too low, and being locked, you are stuck with it. You'd want a 4570 minimum. And yes, 6850 -> to 7870 is pretty so so. A 7950 would have been a stronger upgrade.

Yeh I realize the PCIE 3.0 / SATA3 isnt so much of a big deal, ive been hearing only about a 2% different in performance anyway, but when I think about the money I spent it still bothers me that my parts cant live up to their full potential. As far as the 7870ghz vs the 6850, I realize its probably difficult to see a 14% average increase in performance as well.

Also, never really had any issues with the corsair H60 in terms of cooling capacity, but then again, really cant take this cpu to an aggressive clock anyway because of the power limitations. Guys were getting close to 4.8ghz on air on these things, but ill never see above 4.2ghz because of the board.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Move to Haswell, start mining LTC to make the difference less your return on sale of current board/cpu.

With an i5-4670k you'll get similar multithreaded performance, 50% more cpu limited fps, and use about half as much power doing it. You also can get high performance mATX Intel boards without sacrificing much in the way of features, and basically nothing in the way of CPU performance via OC.

I rode the AMD train all the way up until Sandy Bridge, haven't looked back since I made the switch from AMD. That said I'll be the first one on the AMD train if it's heading towards win any time in the future.

 

[Spawne32]

Move to Haswell, start mining LTC to make the difference less your return on sale of current board/cpu.

With an i5-4670k you'll get similar multithreaded performance, 50% more cpu limited fps, and use about half as much power doing it.

I rode the AMD train all the way up until Sandy Bridge, haven't looked back since I made the switch from AMD. That said I'll be the first one on the AMD train if it's heading towards win any time in the future.

I enjoy touting 8 cores too. lol

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Eight cores is cool, but not if they perform the same as four from Intel while using twice as much power :|

At some point you have to give up the ghost, especially if you're an online gamer like myself. The difference is quite large because they're often grossly cpu bound and limited to two cores at the same time.

 

[sequoia464]

Be interested in comments here also. I'm also using an 8320, but recently bought an i5-4440 (haven't built the i5 machine yet)

 

[nwo]

I rode the AMD train all the way up until Sandy Bridge, haven't looked back since I made the switch from AMD. That said I'll be the first one on the AMD train if it's heading towards win any time in the future.

I'm with you on that one.

I was a huge AMD socket A/754/939 fan. I personally used and preferred all three platforms at the time.

Intel is so far ahead of AMD at this moment that I would never even consider an AMD CPU unless I am on a very very low budget. In that case, I will take an AMD CPU over a Celeron any day.

 

[USER8000]

TBH,power consumption during gaming is higher with the AMD system than an Intel Core i5 for example. However,you are looking at between a 35W to 100W variation at the wall,with a stock FX8350 compared to an Ivy Bridge or Haswell Core i5 K or Core i7 K series CPU when running a highend card and a highend motherboad.

However,out of interest,have you tried just putting your CPU back to stock clockspeeds and stock voltages and running the game?? That Asus motherboard might be throttling when overclocked especially during intensive testing and gaming.

Also do install newer drivers from the AMD site too.

 

[tweakboy]

Do it. What you got to loose but a little money. I wouldnt touch AMD< grab a i5 chip and your set.

 

[Spawne32]

TBH,power consumption during gaming is higher with the AMD system than an Intel Core i5 for example. However,you are looking at between a 35W to 100W variation at the wall,with a stock FX8350 compared to an Ivy Bridge or Haswell Core i5 K or Core i7 K series CPU when running a highend card and a highend motherboad.

However,out of interest,have you tried just putting your CPU back to stock clockspeeds and stock voltages and running the game?? That Asus motherboard might be throttling when overclocked especially during intensive testing and gaming.

Also do install newer drivers from the AMD site too.

You know its funny you should mention that because I just now remember something very very important. When I was doing my overclocking testing, I kept having an issue where the CPU would throttle back for no reason, even though all the throttling settings in the BIOS were disabled. For all intents and purposes the CPU should have ran a consist 4ghz while running prime95, but it kept throttling back to about 2700mhz or so. Someone on OCN had mentioned that there were alot of AMD boards that had issues like this where you had to go into AMD overdrive, enable turbo core control in the software, and then disable it again in the software. Much to my surprise this was exactly the issue I was having, everytime I would boot the computer up I would have to go into AMD overdrive and do this procedure to be able to stress test properly. I just realized that and gave it a whirl to see if it was throttling in game, and unfortunately it made no difference whatsoever. I'm pretty sure this particular issue only has to do with all 8 cores being loaded to 100% which is why i never experience it in game.

HOWEVER, I do have my vcore set to 1.4425 in the bios, CPUZ only reads 1.404 at idle, and under full load drops to 1.344 and eventually after about an hour drops even lower with load line control set to regular. The problem with setting load line control to extreme on this board, is that if i set for 1.4425 in the bios, my idle voltage will wind up being 1.525 at idle, making the CPU insanely hot. Ive also had this board replaced by newegg with a brand new one because I thought that was cause for alarm with the original board, but the new one does exactly the same thing. Strange thing about that is that even with the CPU at bone stock settings, vcore stil behaves the same way.

 

[USER8000]

You know its funny you should mention that because I just now remember something very very important. When I was doing my overclocking testing, I kept having an issue where the CPU would throttle back for no reason, even though all the throttling settings in the BIOS were disabled. For all intents and purposes the CPU should have ran a consist 4ghz while running prime95, but it kept throttling back to about 2700mhz or so. Someone on OCN had mentioned that there were alot of AMD boards that had issues like this where you had to go into AMD overdrive, enable turbo core control in the software, and then disable it again in the software. Much to my surprise this was exactly the issue I was having, everytime I would boot the computer up I would have to go into AMD overdrive and do this procedure to be able to stress test properly. I just realized that and gave it a whirl to see if it was throttling in game, and unfortunately it made no difference whatsoever. I'm pretty sure this particular issue only has to do with all 8 cores being loaded to 100% which is why i never experience it in game.

HOWEVER, I do have my vcore set to 1.4425 in the bios, CPUZ only reads 1.404 at idle, and under full load drops to 1.344 and eventually after about an hour drops even lower with load line control set to regular. The problem with setting load line control to extreme on this board, is that if i set for 1.4425 in the bios, my idle voltage will wind up being 1.525 at idle, making the CPU insanely hot. Ive also had this board replaced by newegg with a brand new one because I thought that was cause for alarm with the original board, but the new one does exactly the same thing. Strange thing about that is that even with the CPU at bone stock settings, vcore stil behaves the same way.

On some other forums,I have seen people us some of the low end MSI mATX motherboards with the FX8320 and they had performance issues which were solved by moving to a better motherboard(low end and midrange 970 based ones). I have more faith in the board you have as it seems much more robost than the MSI ones and has VRM cooling. However,it is quite an old chipset.

Have you tried plonking a fan over the VRM section when gaming and/or perhaps undervolting the CPU,and seeing performance during gaming??

 

[Spawne32]

On some other forums,I have seen people us some of the low end MSI mATX motherboards with the FX8320 and they had performance issues which were solved by moving to a better motherboard(low end and midrange 970 based ones). I have more faith in the board you have as it seems much more robost than the MSI ones and has VRM cooling. However,it is quite an old chipset.

Have you tried plonking a fan over the VRM section when gaming and/or perhaps undervolting the CPU,and seeing performance during gaming??

Havent tried putting a fan over it because it never really seemed to be getting all that hot. Although with the way the TJ08 is setup already, it has a 180mm fan blowing right on it all the time anyway.

Basically thats my dilemma though, the 780G/SB700 chipset is old, and from what I can tell, AMD really has no plans of bringing 9xx to mATX form factor, and basically ZERO future plans for any other good mATX form factor chipsets.

 

[USER8000]

Havent tried putting a fan over it because it never really seemed to be getting all that hot. Although with the way the TJ08 is setup already, it has a 180mm fan blowing right on it all the time anyway.

Basically thats my dilemma though, the 780G/SB700 chipset is old, and from what I can tell, AMD really has no plans of bringing 9xx to mATX form factor, and basically ZERO future plans for any other good mATX form factor chipsets.

Its a bit of a crap situation TBH! 🙁 If your case could take larger motherboards there are a number of relatively cheap 970 motherboards which would probably be fine and you could get a decent overclock on.

I assume you have the latest BIOS for your motherboard?? Out of interest,can you disable modules in the BIOS?? It might be interesting to see what happens if you run the FX8320 has a four or six thread CPU,ie, it should put less of a load on the VRMs. It might be worth a try to see if performance improves(before you actually get any new hardware).

 

[Spawne32]

Its a bit of a crap situation TBH! 🙁 If your case could take larger motherboards there are a number of relatively cheap 970 motherboards which would probably be fine and you could get a decent overclock on.

I assume you have the latest BIOS for your motherboard?? Out of interest,can you disable modules in the BIOS?? It might be interesting to see what happens if you run the FX8320 has a four or six thread CPU,ie, it should put less of a load on the VRMs.

Yeh, latest bios, but gigabyte hasnt released anything for rev 4.0 for this board for over a year. I thought about disabling modules but I dunno, just not really something I wanted to resort to. It's a shit situation all around. I guess ill just hold out that 2014 brings something promising.

 

[USER8000]

Yeh, latest bios, but gigabyte hasnt released anything for rev 4.0 for this board for over a year. I thought about disabling modules but I dunno, just not really something I wanted to resort to. It's a shit situation all around. I guess ill just hold out that 2014 brings something promising.

Its worth a try to see if its a throttling issue though. If you get better performance with four cores and six cores enabled,it would suggest that. At the very least it should hopefully help you with the game now,until your decide to change any hardware.

 

[Spawne32]

Its worth a try to see if its a throttling issue though. If you get better performance with four cores and six cores enabled,it would suggest that. At the very least it should hopefully help you with the game now,until your decide to change any hardware.

Ill have to play around with it this weekend and see how it works out.

 

[AtenRa]

If you wand to keep the mATX format, my suggestion.

Sell the FX8320 + Motherboard, $100.00 will be fair and easy to sell i believe.
Get the ASUS A88XM-Plus FM2+ motherboard = $94,99
Athlon 760K = $89,99

Total = $184,98 that is only ~85.00 bucks if you sell the FX8320 + Mobo.

Since you have that Watercooling kit, OC that Athlon 760K to 4.8-5GHz+, you will get much better performance in Guild Wars 2 than a 4GHz FX cpu and you will also get SATA-3, USB-3 and PCI-e 3 (with kaveri).
Next year upgrade the CPU to Kaveri if it turns out to have that much more single thread performance.

 

[Spawne32]

If you wand to keep the mATX format, my suggestion.

Sell the FX8320 + Motherboard, $100.00 will be fair and easy to sell i believe.
Get the ASUS A88XM-Plus FM2+ motherboard = $94,99
Athlon 760K = $89,99

Total = $184,98 that is only ~85.00 bucks if you sell the FX8320 + Mobo.

Since you have that Watercooling kit, OC that Athlon 760K to 4.8-5GHz+, you will get much better performance in Guild Wars 2 than a 4GHz FX cpu and you will also get SATA-3, USB-3 and PCI-e 3 (with kaveri).
Next year upgrade the CPU to Kaveri if it turns out to have that much more single thread performance.

Here's a question, ive looked at the i5 and the FM2+ cpu's, and im a little puzzled with regards to the onboard graphics on all these processors. Do they actually make use of the onboard graphics on the CPU if you are running an external graphics card? It seems like its a total waste from a performance gaming pc standpoint unless it makes some sort of use of the onboard GPU. AMD seems to be steering entirely towards APU's all together and mobile computing and I imagine throughout all of 2014 their performance enhancements, be it chipsets or CPU's will all be for the FM2+ socket and the APU kaveri cpu's.

Think I should just wait for the new offerings in the FM2+ market and jump to an APU and FM2+ motherboard?

 

[Gikaseixas]

Your mobo is the limiting factor here. The 8320 and up beg for robust VRM config and your chipset while supporting the cpu is really old.
Given the mATX case you have i'd sell this combo and grab either a:
Z87 mobo with a core i3 4330 (Two really fast cores)
or
FM2+ mobo with a A10 6800 (four decent cores)

 

[Spawne32]

If i do convert to FM2+ im going to wait for kaveri (january 14th), question is, how much am i sacrificing processor wise to go for a APU when I already have dedicated graphics.

 

[AtenRa]

If i do convert to FM2+ im going to wait for kaveri (january 14th), question is, how much am i sacrificing processor wise to go for a APU when I already have dedicated graphics.

Single thread performance will be much higher with Kaveri over FX8320 clock to clock. You will also be able to OC higher than what you can with your current setup. With a 4.6-4.8GHz Kaveri you will get roughly ~50% more single thread performance vs FX8320 @ 4GHz. You will loose Multithread performance though but you will gain more features both in motherboard (USB3, SATA-3 etc) and some features from Kaveri like True Audio and PCIe-3 etc.

If you only care about Guild Wars 2 performance then going to FM2+ with a quad core Kaveri + OC will get you the best performance gains at the lowest price.