Finally!
Some of your numbers don't make sense. I won't get into all of them, but...
It's not $200 vs $220. I rather painstakingly, and mistakenly, took the time to lay that out.
Yes, yes it is. Deals don't count; they're not normal price. There's a reason why they're called "a special" or "a deal". They last a limited amount of time, and are at many times unavailable for the vast majority of people.
i5 vs FX MT throughput? 1 to .85? Is that 4x1 vs 8 x .85 or what? I would think so... and probably more like 8 x .7 or worse.. which still makes its MT throughput not look quite so horrible. Unless you're saying that an i5 core has (more than) twice the IPC of a BD thread? I haven't seen it be that bad in practice in DC projects. Recently in Prime Grid when the SB had AVX in play that was true, however. ~900 Seconds for an i5 2500k to finish a WU versus ~2100 seconds on an 8120. As you have said yourself, AVX being broadly implemented soon is unlikely
A well written one should work for BD too, which was not the case during this last race.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sandy-bridge-e-efficiency-core-i7-3960x,3075.html
Do the conversion to get them at the same clock speed. i5 is slightly faster. 8 cores won't do you much good if each of them are almost 60% slower and taking into account core scaling decreases as you add cores.
But enough with all that already, we obviously approach these things from different angles.
What I am seeing is that for $200 I see a nice motherboard (which I value) paired with a current CPU that has reasonable performance across a variety of scenarios. $200 happens to about my minimum for what I want to see someone spend on a new PC motherboard/cpu combo.
It's a *deal*, not a normal price. Get that through your head and maybe you'll finally understand. Not everyone (almost no one, as a matter of fact) lives near a MicroCenter. For 95% of enthusiasts, it's $200 vs $220. I don't care about your *particular* situation, just like I don't take Balla seriously when he's raving about his GTX 470s that he got cheap on some deals. I don't take kindly to people mentioning after rebate as if it were upfront price, either. Others forget to mention shipping, too.
As discussed previously ad nauseum, and I'll not continue to debate it (and the point I am trying to make is AMD vs AMD and less AMD versus Intel), AMD has not been an ideal choice for a while.
But if it came down to someone wanting a $400-$500 build, I would consider the Bulldozer deal at Microcenter. If that $40-$80 savings meant they could upgrade their case, power supply, video card or somehow work in an SSD I would take it in a minute. Like I said, getting that slightly nicer than budget motherboard has value to me. It's hard to get an i3 with a nice board for $200, although you could do it at MC. I'd likely consider what they mainly used the PC for, if it was gaming heavy I would more seriously consider the i3 over the FX - and we can all agree that is sad for the FX.
Obviously, the same thing again. It's a deal, not a normal price.
I just recently did an i3 2100 build, a 2500k build and a 2600k build for others because it made sense for them at the price points and priorities they had. (Cheap gaming only, wanted a nice PC in the ~$600 range, and a guy who builds a PC every five years.) My sister called me up and wanted a PC for $250, max. I bought a 960t from Microcenter, unlocked it, and now she has a reasonable PC that has a 960t, 880G graphics and 8GB DDR3 for $250. I tried working an i3 in there and just couldn't make it work. Against a celeron or pentium dual core I decided the x6 had the edge.
Phenom II X6=decent. No one has said otherwise.
At a certain price point, BD has a place and it is nearing it. With the demise of Phenom II, it may be that or an i3 or lower if you want new mobo/CPU under $200 and that's the unfortunate reality of the situation. Saying only idiots buy BD is what puts my back up, I don't agree with you and it is likely neither of us will change our mind.
Except you forgot that's a sale, a deal; not a normal price. Also, you need to have a MicroCenter near you by obligation. The FX-8120 costs $200. If you can find it for half the price on rare occassion, good. To say that's *the* price of it is completely disingenuous, however.
For those with AMD brand preference (they exist!) you can make a car (truck) analogy and I will. They could by a Ford w/EcoBoost and superior power, towing and mileage. They buy the Chevy/Dodge/Tundra anyway. I have friends like this, and at least AMD is pricing their chips closer to the reality of their performance. To them, I would mention this deal as well.
I don't care about brand preference. I'm not loyal to any company. I buy what's best for the price and that's that. Companies want your money, and that's alright, but mine is going to who can do the best things for my budget. If I were shopping right now I'd go for another Intel CPU and probably an AMD GPU. NVIDIA's only good cards for the money are the GTX 560 Ti and the GTX 570.
Last, link to the 1045t vs 6100 article? The last I had looked, it seemed like most people were happy to forget that they existed. With Thuban drying up and their prices having dropped significantly it seems like I need to better know how that is shaking out. The last article I had read pitted the 4100 vs the i3 2100 and it didn't get bloodied as bad as I might have imagined. Pretty much it was gaming better on the i3 and wash outside of that.
There's no articles pitting one against the other because the 1045T wasn't sampled to reviewers. There's results for the 1055T and 6100, though.
Cinebench 11.5:
1055T: 5.02 points
6100: 3.34 points
HandBrake:
1055T: 16.59FPS
6100: 13.73 FPS
If you want more benches you'll have to look deeper since they're not pitted against each other. However, the only scenario where the 6100 is faster is Photoshop and WinRAR.
Also, most reviews featuring the FX-4100 showed it being solidly beaten. No idea where you got "the same apart from gaming". Both the Core i3 and Phenom II X4 are faster on average.
Well said
Linkage to our DC subforum for admittedly "unscientific" results in Thuban vs BD:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2223821&page=2
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