Help me pick a CPU please

[Hipheron]

I was going to get a i5 2500 but we all know how that has ended up So I am going with plan B and some AMD stuff and I have narrowed it down to 2 boards. Let me say I am building this as a gaming rig (not extremely high end but a pretty decent comp) I will be using a Nvidia 460 GTX with plans for 8 gigs of ram and an ASRock 870 EXTREME3 AM3 AMD 870 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157198

The two CPUs i'm trying to choose from are the AMD Phenom II X6 1075T Thuban 3.0GHz 6 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 125W Six-Core
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...II%20X6%201075

or the AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 125W Quad-Core

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103808

What i want to know is if the $50 extra is worth it for the upgrade, I am not very experienced with overclocking and I do not plan on doing it right now but I may mess with it in the future (although I will not be trying to push my CPU too hard). I am not real techy and did not understand most of the articles I looked at so I figured I would ask if I would get much more performance out of the 1075t rather than the 955

 

[Castiel]

How about something like this?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboD...t=Combo.580889


Or if you want Hyperthreading

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117225&cm_re=X3440-_-19-117-225-_-Product
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813188054&cm_re=P55-_-13-188-054-_-Product

 

[Markfw]

X6 all the way.

However, to be fair, the I7 950 is still slightly better.

And that 760 isn't bad either.. I just like my 950's

 

[BD231]

Don't bother with AMD if you're willing to spend 200 bucks on a CPU.

 

[Hipheron]

Will I just get less speed out of an AMD rather than an intel processor? Just stock, no overclocking, is that Intel Core i5-760 Lynnfield 2.8GHz LGA 1156 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor BX80605I5760 going to be faster and run games better than the 1075t?

 

[Castiel]

Will I just get less speed out of an AMD rather than an intel processor? Just stock, no overclocking, is that Intel Core i5-760 Lynnfield 2.8GHz LGA 1156 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor BX80605I5760 going to be faster and run games better than the 1075t?

760 is a better gamer then an X6

 

[Hipheron]

That is exactly what I wanted to know, thank you all for the advice

 

[Jovec]

Gaming is AMD's weakest genre. Not that it is bad, but just that Intel is better. For general usage, either is great. For heavily threaded apps, AMD competes well with more cores.

If you want to maximize AMD's gaming potential, you'll definitely need to overclock both the cores and the cpu-nb, further favoring Intel given your criteria.

Consider yourself lucky you won't have to deal with SB recalls/replacements/re-installations/re-activations/etc. If you can wait, I'd just wait for the revised chipset fix in a couple months. The current sockets from both Intel and AMD are on their last legs (excluding 1155, but...). Having said that, the 1156 and 1366 CPUs are no slouches, but you won't be seeing many (if any) new CPUs released for those sockets. And future CPUs for those sockets are not likely to be cheap either.

 

[RussianSensation]

The 6-series chipset issue only affects SATA 2 ports. For example, Asus P8P67 boards have 4x SATA 3.0 ports (2 off the chipset and 2 off the Marvell controller).

So unless you plan on going with more than 4 DVD/SSD/HDDs, I would still grab a SB processor as it's so much superior to everything else. Asus also has Advanced Replacement for motherboards in the 1st year of warranty. They will send you a new board before you send them your old one. Once the fix is available in late Feb-April, you'll have your new board.

For gaming, it makes no sense at all to get a $150-200 AMD CPU. In that case you are way better off going with previous generation i5/i7s. X6 is only competitive for those into heavy multi-tasking (video rendering/enconding, audio work, distributed computing, etc.).

 

[hamunaptra]

AMD is fine for gaming, ive read several places it actually delivers a smoother gaming experience, sure not the highest FPS at the lowest resolutions like the benchmarks show ( not to mention AMD and intel come close at higher res w/ eye candy enabled).

Once you run at a decent resolution with all eye candy on, the CPU becomes lesser of a concern.

If you plan on doing anything other than gaming like other things while gaming or encoding or whatever ... I would go for AMD.

If you can wait 2-3 months BD looks like its shapin up to be a possible game changer, ... AMD might be on top with it once again, I would wait, especially considering the recent SATA bugs on intel h67/p67 platform boards.

 

[drizek]

Just buy the video card and put it in whatever you have now. When bulldozer comes out, buy that (or a 2500K).

 

[LiuKangBakinPie]

Get a 140usd X4 then spend the extra 80usd you saved on a better GPU coz cpu power are not that important for gaming as the gpu is

 

[Castiel]

AMD is fine for gaming, ive read several places it actually delivers a smoother gaming experience, sure not the highest FPS at the lowest resolutions like the benchmarks show ( not to mention AMD and intel come close at higher res w/ eye candy enabled).

Smoother huh

 

[gregoryvg]

If I were going to get AMD right now and not go for the cheapest CPU, I think I would get the six-core version over the quad, even for games. Right now almost every new pc game uses at least two-cores and many are using four-cores (I read that Resident Evil 5 can use more than four cores). It's only a matter of time before games start using four to six-cores regularly. At that point in time the six-core AMD chip will really come into it's own as you will get more performance out if it vs. the four-core AMD design - and it *SHOULD* become more competitive relative to intel's quad-core offerings.

Also keep in mind in CPU reviews they keep a pretty much sterile environment. The average PC user will usually have more happening in the background than a reviewers PC. In a real-world situation I wonder how a six-core CPU would fare vs. a four-core one.

 

[atxupshot]

I just got the Phenom X6 3.0ghz and its running fine. The small difference is not worth the extra 30 dollars. But that's just my opinion.

 

[Castiel]

If I were going to get AMD right now and not go for the cheapest CPU, I think I would get the six-core version over the quad, even for games. Right now almost every new pc game uses at least two-cores and many are using four-cores (I read that Resident Evil 5 can use more than four cores). It's only a matter of time before games start using four to six-cores regularly. At that point in time the six-core AMD chip will really come into it's own as you will get more performance out if it vs. the four-core AMD design - and it *SHOULD* become more competitive relative to intel's quad-core offerings.

Also keep in mind in CPU reviews they keep a pretty much sterile environment. The average PC user will usually have more happening in the background than a reviewers PC. In a real-world situation I wonder how a six-core CPU would fare vs. a four-core one.

The X6 doesn't fare very well against any Core I5/I7 Quad

 

[OCGuy]

I would go i7 930/950 before I touched anything AMD right now, unless you need a super-budget rig.

 

[gregoryvg]

The X6 doesn't fare very well against any Core I5/I7 Quad

In gaming, you're correct, because most of the games tested use 2-4 threads. There are some productivity apps that use more than four threads where the x6 closes the gap with intel by quite a bit. My point was that an AMD x6 is more future-proof than an AMD x4 at this point in time as games start to use more threads. And as seen in productivity apps, when that happens the x6 will blow by the x4 and narrow the gap with the intel chips.

 

[Castiel]

In gaming, you're correct, because most of the games tested use 2-4 threads. There are some productivity apps that use more than four threads where the x6 closes the gap with intel by quite a bit. My point was that an AMD x6 is more future-proof than an AMD x4 at this point in time as games start to use more threads. And as seen in productivity apps, when that happens the x6 will blow by the x4 and narrow the gap with the intel chips.

Problem is thuban's IPC isn't even close to bloomfield's or lynnfields. Yeah you can throw more cores at everything but that it still doesn't hide the fact that if amd's IPC were better you wouldn't need so many cores.

 

[f4phantom2500]

why not just pick up a 2500k on ebay (or from microcenter, if you live near one; according to their website you can still buy them in the store), then get a mobo with enough sata3 ports off of ebay (or get an add-on sata controller card)?