Richland CPUs - Are AMD CPUs the "best bang for the buck"?

[TheDarkKnight]

If your an Intel fanboy please stop reading and go troll somewhere else. This is a legitimate attempt to start an honest discussion about the "current state of things" with regards to which CPU manufacturer makes the most CPUs that offer "the best bang for the buck".

I have been researching the purchase of a new CPU. I had at first decided that my next CPU would be an Intel CPU no matter what specific model number, completely discounting AMD CPUs from even the slightest consideration. But after having done much research on the matter lately, it seems I may have bought into a false assumption that AMD CPUs are total crap. I see people saying that and maybe that was true for awhile during the release of "Bulldozer" chips. But from what I am reading it seems things have gotten a lot better.

My assessment of the current situation as it applies to the comparison of AMD CPUs versus Intel CPUs goes something like this.

Yes, Intel makes technologically superior CPUs. But when viewed at from the perspective of the CPU(s) that give the "best bang for buck" I am starting to think that it may be AMD.

For instance, maybe it's true that a top of the line Intel dual-core CPU can perform 1 million floating-point calculations per second. And it would take an AMD quad-core to perform the same 1 million floating-point calculations in the same amount of time. Obviously then everybody would say Intel chips are superior and that AMD sucks because an Intel dual-core can get the same work done that an AMD quad-core can in the same amount of time.

I think this is true but at what cost premium? Who cares if it takes double the cores to perform the same task that an Intel can perform in the same time span. If the AMD quad-core chip is cheaper than the equivalent performing Intel dual-core CPU?

So after explaining the way I see things I would like peoples opinion on this issue. Once again, yes, we all can probably agree, Intel CPUs are technologically superior. But are they the best bang for the buck. Or is Intel riding a wave of popularity because people are so blind and want bragging rights about having the superior technology versus getting the most for their money?

 

[tamm]

Lets be honest here the title "best value for money" is subjective and only applicable in the specific purpose of the whole machine.

For instance, if your running an HTPC, the best bang for buck would be almost any APU. Intel's offerings just can`t match it. However if someone wanted to build a computer for a single threaded simulation game such as FS2004, then the best value of money would be any recent Sandy, Ivy, or Haswell K or nonK series CPU since they offer excellent single-threaded performance.

There is no single best value cpu outthere. My rule is to figure out whats my majority workload going to be. Then figure out whether the majority of the majority (mind bender there) will be single threaded or multi-threaded and then determine the CPU best for me aka best CPU for money.

just my 2 cents

 

[Phynaz]

You will find that - outside of corner cases - CPU prices are in relation to their performance, and there really isn't a price difference between AMD and Intel.

It basically comes down to which CPU is best at running the applications you use.

 

[TheDarkKnight]

You will find that - outside of corner cases - CPU prices are in relation to their performance, and there really isn't a price difference between AMD and Intel.

It basically comes down to which CPU is best at running the applications you use.

I think your over simplifying the situation just a bit too much. You make it sound as though any CPU purchase you make is just as valid as any "other".
And you completely removed the ratio of money to performance in your response which is what my question was about.

 

[Torn Mind]

Only a fool would go in excluding a product on nothing more than hearsay.

AMD CPUs have their place in the $140 and under range. Mainly because the consolidate two portions of the "basket of goods" into one package, which are the GPU and CPU and offer solid performance(Core 2 Quad Q9550). Or, in the case of the FX-6300, gives a solid level of performance for the price.

Also, most ofthe Intel dual-cores that compete with the AMD quads are within the same price range. There is no significant cost premium when talking about i3 vs A10 or FX-4300.

Technologically superior is a vague term, and does not give a clue as to what is superior. Intel is superior in single-core performance, efficiency with regards to performance and power consumption, and versatility. Having fast single cores means that programs that don't scale well with threads can run quickly, which is important for business and architects, among others because software like Revit or accounting software don't scale well with a huge amount of cores. And of course, certain games like fast single threads, and there was a backlash against the original Bulldozer due to observed lack of performance due to said slow threads. Maybe in the days of the Pentium 4, Intel could rightfully be accused of relying on hype for their sales, but now, they have certain tangible advantages that are pulling buyers towards them, especially among buyers of the Core i5s and higher. The $140 and under though, is less clear cut in their favor.

 

[Torn Mind]

Lets be honest here the title "best value for money" is subjective and only applicable in the specific purpose of the whole machine.

For instance, if your running an HTPC, the best bang for buck would be almost any APU. Intel's offerings just can`t match it. However if someone wanted to build a computer for a single threaded simulation game such as FS2004, then the best value of money would be any recent Sandy, Ivy, or Haswell K or nonK series CPU since they offer excellent single-threaded performance.

There is no single best value cpu outthere. My rule is to figure out whats my majority workload going to be. Then figure out whether the majority of the majority (mind bender there) will be single threaded or multi-threaded and then determine the CPU best for me aka best CPU for money.

just my 2 cents

Unless you watch movies at 23.976 fps native on a TV and care about even the most intermittent of skips. Then Haswell becomes the CPU of choice because it eliminates that problem completely.

 

[tamm]

Unless you watch movies at 23.976 fps native on a TV and care about even the most intermittent of skips. Then Haswell becomes the CPU of choice because it eliminates that problem completely.

Your post is kind of unclear of whether your stating APUs are good or bad in relation to HTPC performance. But IMO Apus are better in an HTPC unless your budget is of no concern 🙂

Articles of support
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd-richland-intel-haswell-gpu_9.html#sect0
http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/05/review-round-up-intel-haswell-vs-amd-richland/
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7032/amds-richland-vs-intels-haswell-gpu-on-the-desktop-radeon-hd-8670d-hd-4600/6

 

[pcsavvy]

+1 tamm

When looking at "best bang for the buck cpu" there are many factors that come into play.
What is the purpose of your system-hardcore gaming, htpc, general purpose office machine, home server?

What is your budget? Should you go for cpu power, gpu power or balanced machine?

Are you upgrading bits and pieces or are you building the whole system?

No matter what, it makes no sense to buy K series cpu if you can not afford the motherboard that allows overclocking at that point if you want to o/c, it may make more sense to buy AMD.

 

[Yuriman]

In certain price ranges, AMD makes more sense. In others, Intel makes more sense. I'm talking strictly for gaming below:


At just over $100 budget for GPU + video card, an AMD APU makes sense.

Bring your budget up to $150 and a Pentium paired with a discrete card (ie 7750) will provide a better overall experience than an A10 or A8, though you might opt for one of the higher end APUs in order to have a smaller machine or reduce noise. Remember that an APU will require more expensive RAM to extract full performance.

Closer to $250 and it's going to be either an i3 or FX-6300, depending on your use. If Battlefield is your thing, the FX-6300 shines in this price bracket. If you want to play Guild Wars 2 or Starcraft (exclusively), you're actually better off with even a Haswell Celeron. I'd say the 6300 is overall a stronger chip but it doesn't win hands-down against an i3. As for overclocking, if you want to do any significant overclocking on the 6300 you'll need a more expensive board than you could pair with the i3 so it's not exactly free performance.

Once you hit $300, I have a hard time recommending anything but an i5. The lower end i5's are a bit more expensive than an FX-8320 but are fine with a cheaper board. If you want to overclock, you end up spending close to the same on the motherboard/CPU combo and will, in a majority of cases, get more out of Intel's offering.

-------

If I were to put together a PC for my father right now it would probably be a Haswell-based Celeron as he has virtually no use for the extra graphical grunt of AMD's APUs and mostly uses his PC for content consumption and email/pictures.

For some specific uses you might make a case for an AMD octa, but Intel's integrated GPU really does add value in a work/business machine in most cases.

 

[Torn Mind]

Your post is kind of unclear of whether your stating APUs are good or bad in relation to HTPC performance. But IMO Apus are better in an HTPC unless your budget is of no concern 🙂

Articles of support
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd-richland-intel-haswell-gpu_9.html#sect0
http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/05/review-round-up-intel-haswell-vs-amd-richland/
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7032/amds-richland-vs-intels-haswell-gpu-on-the-desktop-radeon-hd-8670d-hd-4600/6

That's because betterness wasn't the point. It was a matter of pointing hardware suitability for a select subset of buyers: those who play Blu Rays and notice even the slightest imperfection due to the so-called 24 fps bug.

IMO, in general, for an HTPC per se, and not a console substitute, I cannot see how one really could go wrong with either Intel or AMD unless a specific quirk like the 24fps bug or the need to game off the IGP breaks the tie. The question is not which chip performs better, but if there is a noticeable attribute or not. Once the question of "does it have a lead" is answered, the next question is "does it matter to the end user"? There are no absolute suggestions in HTPC building because there is too much variation in the user needs. It is a case-by-case matter of being optimal suitability; even a measly Raspberry Pi could be a perfect HTPC for some people.

Upon reviewing the contents of the conclusions of the articles, I seem to see no real mention of whether the chips failed to perform HTPC tasks properly(i.e Intel failing to play 4K video adequately), but plenty of graphics and gaming performance comparisions. Or in other words, the standard performance review that really doesn't answer the question of whether the chips have certain tiebreakers in actual HTPC tasks over the other. Maybe Richland is a superior transcoding chip vs the i3. Can't be sure about that based on the reviews alone.

 

[frozentundra123456]

I actually consider the FX 6300 and for certain games and productivity uses the 83xx to be the best values in their price class. Except for certain cases like a sff build, I am not a fan at all of their apus.

They are in limbo between having more graphics power than the casual user needs and still being slower than an athlon x4 with a HD 7750 which gives about twice the performance for a very small increase in price.

 

[lamedude]

The Haswell i3's are mostly uncrippled but the Athlon 760K is still a better value IMO. For $30 less than a i3-4130 you get better MT performance and unlocked multi so with a little bit of OC'ing it should have >= ST performance.

 

[William Gaatjes]

It is all about what you want to do with your pc. Do you need the maximum performance that you can buy out there or not ?

I bought a richland APU A6700(65W) with HD8670 onboard. I could have gone for the A6800 but i wanted a low power envelope.
For what i use it for, it is more then sufficient. Encoding of mp3 from my cd collection goes in 3 seconds for a 3 minute song. Games that i like to play i can run at maximum settings. Compiling programs is for me fast enough. Running VMware does not even make a difference in user interface response when compared to the host system. It all runs fine.

 

[frozentundra123456]

I think your over simplifying the situation just a bit too much. You make it sound as though any CPU purchase you make is just as valid as any "other".
And you completely removed the ratio of money to performance in your response which is what my question was about.

Actually, that is not what he said at all. He did not remove the cost at all, but said that the market is fairly efficient in adjusting price to reflect performance, or at least that is what I understood him to mean. I would pretty much agree with this. So it basically comes down to matching ones expected usage to whichever architecture matches the workload.

I also believe that within reason, it is false economy to skimp on the CPU to try to save a few bucks. In the past, CPU performance was increasing rapidly, so one could plan on upgrading every year or two no matter what. Now with the slowing to a crawl of raw CPU performance, a CPU should easily last several years.

 

[TheDarkKnight]

Actually, that is not what he said at all. He did not remove the cost at all, but said that the market is fairly efficient in adjusting price to reflect performance, or at least that is what I understood him to mean. I would pretty much agree with this. So it basically comes down to matching ones expected usage to whichever architecture matches the workload.

I also believe that within reason, it is false economy to skimp on the CPU to try to save a few bucks. In the past, CPU performance was increasing rapidly, so one could plan on upgrading every year or two no matter what. Now with the slowing to a crawl of raw CPU performance, a CPU should easily last several years.

What it "sounds" like he said to me, although I could be wrong, is that there is no chip that offers more bang per buck, percentage wise, than any other chip. Or to put it in other words, it sounds like he said, "You always get what you pay for, so actually it is not possible to get ripped off by the 'bang per buck' theory". His implication being that the market itself is perfectly in tune with no variations in the bang per buck performance levels in the realm of AMD or Intel. So, in my interpretation he completely removed the "best bang for buck" ratio theory by saying, "You don't really have to worry about looking for that. AMD and Intel keep that fair on your behalf." And that, is what I am not so sure is true. Are Intel prices truly in line with their performance levels? They command no premiums at all for being the superior technology? Are you seriously going to back up your claim that there are currently no CPUs available right now that offer a higher return on investment than any other CPU purchase? That the performance levels of all available CPUs scale up perfectly with their market prices? Please......

If that's true, I can close my eyes, pick any CPU from Intel or AMD and sleep like a baby knowing AMD and Intel have my best interest at heart. I don't think so. 🙂
Market prices are dictated by supply and demand. So if Intel can create the perception that their chips are superior to the competition they can inflate their prices based upon that factor alone regardless of the price/performance ratio that a CPU delivers. And honestly, I think that's what they have done. Furthermore, it seems last generation CPUs hold their market value as long as current generation CPUs in spite of the fact that the price/performance ratio has dropped considerably when comparing what you can buy today for the same price. Old CPUs don't seem to scale down in price when new ones are introduced. At least not at the rate they should, if ever.

So suggesting that I can close my eyes and pick any CPU available today and feel good about it? I just don't think so.

 

[seitur]

What is 'best bang for buck' depend on your REQUIREMENTS.

Talking about this without stating requirements is pointless.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Bring your budget up to $150 and a Pentium paired with a discrete card (ie 7750) will provide a better overall experience than an A10 or A8, though you might opt for one of the higher end APUs in order to have a smaller machine or reduce noise. Remember that an APU will require more expensive RAM to extract full performance.

Depending on which games you play, the Athlon 750/760K is an equally viable choice in that bracket. Not least because either will handle 4GHz+ overclocks on the stock cooler. You also save on RAM, they run fine on standard 1333MHz memory. I'm a little hesitant to recommend dualcore non-HT CPUs for general gaming, but if you have a particular game that requires strong single thread performance, the Pentiums are certainly viable.

In the end, its always a trade-of. You can't have everything on a budget... 😉

 

[SPBHM]

The Haswell i3's are mostly uncrippled but the Athlon 760K is still a better value IMO. For $30 less than a i3-4130 you get better MT performance and unlocked multi so with a little bit of OC'ing it should have >= ST performance.

better MT performance on what? the 4130 seems to beat 4c Vishera at 3.8-4.2GHz for most MT stuff here, also the ST difference is significant, a small OC is not enough...

http://pclab.pl/art54006-10.html

don't get me wrong, the X4 is good for it's price, but Haswell i3 is also not bad at all.

 

[TheDarkKnight]

What is 'best bang for buck' depend on your REQUIREMENTS.

Talking about this without stating requirements is pointless.

I guess that's one way of looking at it. But I was looking at the question more along the lines of the ratio of the "maximum"(<----) performance and features a CPU offers to the cost of the CPU. Not the features and performance a single random individual on planet earth is consuming versus the cost of the CPU. Your delving into some sort of philosophical realm which I didn't really want to get into.

 

[TheDarkKnight]

Unless you watch movies at 23.976 fps native on a TV and care about even the most intermittent of skips. Then Haswell becomes the CPU of choice because it eliminates that problem completely.

Can you go into more depth on this issue please or post some links which explain the issue..does this "fps" bug effect the latest generation of AMD CPUs or just last generation? Where does the bug exists in the CPU or the BIOS...does BIOS update fix the bug?

 

[Gikaseixas]

I actually consider the FX 6300 and for certain games and productivity uses the 83xx to be the best values in their price class. Except for certain cases like a sff build

+100 agree with this. APU's are nice too and top end ones game well on medium settings (most games) but i'm waiting for the day that both Intel and AMD release a solution that is both potent CPU wise and challenges low end stand alone GPU's

 

[BallaTheFeared]

You will find that - outside of corner cases - CPU prices are in relation to their performance, and there really isn't a price difference between AMD and Intel.

It basically comes down to which CPU is best at running the applications you use.

This is similar to how I evaluate price/perf when it comes to CPUs, and GPUs as well.

First I try to figure out how much performance I want, and in what programs, then I figured out which CPUs can actually hit that (which is extremely limited for me). After that I then evaluate the products based on the cost to achieve what I'm looking for.

It's the same way for GPUs, the R290 seems to be the "price/perf" leader for high end for a lot of people, but if I want 20% more performance than what R290 offers what then? If I was going solely by price/perf than I wouldn't even be looking at a R290 in the first place right?

I guess the point here is you can't just look at price/perf, you have to have a baseline performance in mind before you can even start looking at evaluating which product gives you the most performance for your buck.

For me this simple way of looking at it basically eliminates 99% of the chips on the market, because I need speed, and I need it per core. So because I need the speed OC provides and I need the per core Intel provides.. Due to Intel nerfing base clock overclocking my options are limited to two sku's, which then makes my choice extremely easy. For my use case the i7 makes no sense over the i5, so for me the i5 represents the best bang for the my personal buck based on my own personal needs.

I guess for me this works because I have the luxury of buying products based on what I need, while not being limited to the slowest products on the market due to a limited budget.

 

[frozentundra123456]

What it "sounds" like he said to me, although I could be wrong, is that there is no chip that offers more bang per buck, percentage wise, than any other chip. Or to put it in other words, it sounds like he said, "You always get what you pay for, so actually it is not possible to get ripped off by the 'bang per buck' theory". His implication being that the market itself is perfectly in tune with no variations in the bang per buck performance levels in the realm of AMD or Intel. So, in my interpretation he completely removed the "best bang for buck" ratio theory by saying, "You don't really have to worry about looking for that. AMD and Intel keep that fair on your behalf." And that, is what I am not so sure is true. Are Intel prices truly in line with their performance levels? They command no premiums at all for being the superior technology? Are you seriously going to back up your claim that there are currently no CPUs available right now that offer a higher return on investment than any other CPU purchase? That the performance levels of all available CPUs scale up perfectly with their market prices? Please......

If that's true, I can close my eyes, pick any CPU from Intel or AMD and sleep like a baby knowing AMD and Intel have my best interest at heart. I don't think so. 🙂
Market prices are dictated by supply and demand. So if Intel can create the perception that their chips are superior to the competition they can inflate their prices based upon that factor alone regardless of the price/performance ratio that a CPU delivers. And honestly, I think that's what they have done. Furthermore, it seems last generation CPUs hold their market value as long as current generation CPUs in spite of the fact that the price/performance ratio has dropped considerably when comparing what you can buy today for the same price. Old CPUs don't seem to scale down in price when new ones are introduced. At least not at the rate they should, if ever.

So suggesting that I can close my eyes and pick any CPU available today and feel good about it? I just don't think so.

Obviously, you have to pick the CPU to match your needs. If you want fast single core performance, you will want to go Intel. If you want the best graphics performance without a discrete card, you will want an APU. If you want the best performance in highly multithreaded apps, vishera may be best for that, while
For well rounded gaming an i5 is best. If you just want a basic box almost anything will work. I don't see any killer price/performance bargain from either manufacturer in the i5 and below range. It is more making a good match to your needs. To be honest, almost any CPU now gives a fantastic amount of performance for the price.

 

[CHADBOGA]

Maybe things will improve when Kaveri comes out, but right now I find AMD's range terribly uninspiring and have not been tempted to buy or recommend to others, anything they currently sell.

 

[frozentundra123456]

I guess that's one way of looking at it. But I was looking at the question more along the lines of the ratio of the "maximum"(<----) performance and features a CPU offers to the cost of the CPU. Not the features and performance a single random individual on planet earth is consuming versus the cost of the CPU. Your delving into some sort of philosophical realm which I didn't really want to get into.

I would argue that matching your purchase to your requirements is not some philosophical exercise, but the key point of getting the best "bang for the buck". Look at an extreme example car analogy. A subcompact car is the best bang for the buck for driving with a single person on board, but certainly not the best bang for the buck for hauling a two ton load of bricks. It all goes back to the usage.