Did I goof on my CPU choice for this build?

[squirrel dog]

What you did is great .

 

[Headfoot]

OC that 4350!

 

[waltchan]

Wow, I never knew my $45 all I can afford FX-4100 rates so badly in games. Is Athlon II X4 645 Propus (full 4 cores than FX-4100's 2-modules, but no L3 cache vs. 8MB in FX-4100) any better, which also sells for the same price?

If you have to pick one, would you take Athlon 645 or FX-4100?

 

[DrMrLordX]

Propus struggles in some games due to the lack of l3. You can sort-of cover up for that with a killer memory overclock, though the Propus IMC doesn't go as far as Thuban, so you'll be stuck at around DDR3-1666 or so, or maybe a little faster since that's a c3 chip. You can still rock DDR3-1666 CL 6 or 7 if you have really good DIMMs (I always wanted CL 5, but never got there).

The 4100 is Bulldozer so . . . yeah. That L3 doesn't offer much help.

Personally I would go with the Propus if I had a weak board and weak cooling. You can max that thing out at around 3.7 GHz (or higher) on not-very-good cooling. That Bulldozer will probably perform better if you can push it to the limit, which may require a robust board and nice cooling. If you have that already and don't mind the power draw then that's probably going to perform better.

 

[SlowSpyder]

AMD gets a lot of hate on these forums, but the fact is the vast majority of games and apps run quite well even if AMD is clearly in second place compared to Intel.