Son wants to build his first gaming PC...need advice

[country2]

My son wants to build "his" first PC and it will be used for gaming he plays BF4, WoW, Guild and other games like that and he has a budget of $400 and will be re-using ATX case, power supply (Seasonic SS-750KM3 750W), Sapphire HD 7870 Video card, LCD monitor and already bought a 2TB Seagate hard drive.

Will be no overclocking and parts will be bought in US. No preferred brand of motherboard as long as it has good reviews as my beloved Epox went under years ago and Abit followed shortly.

I've been building PC's myself for bout 10 years but I don't play games and have been reading up on the new games supporting 6 cores or more with the new engine coming out and that AMD FX8350 may be the best for gaming in the near future for this. So I'm stuck with helping him decide if he needs to go with a intel setup using a [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]i5-4670K possibly or take a small performance hit but be futurized better with AMD setup running a [/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]FX 8350.

So what do you think?
[/FONT]

 

[DaveSimmons]

Intel CPUs are still better for gaming. Games are becoming more highly threaded but faster cores will run those extra threads better than slower AMD cores.

If not overclocking, you can get a basic motherboard (ASRock makes good ones) and get a non-"K" i5 or i7.

 

[runzwithsizorz]

Intel also planning on 8 core cpu...Haswell E

http://www.techpowerup.com/185719/haswell-e-intels-first-8-core-desktop-processor-exposed.html?cp=2

 

[country2]

Intel CPUs are still better for gaming. Games are becoming more highly threaded but faster cores will run those extra threads better than slower AMD cores.

If not overclocking, you can get a basic motherboard (ASRock makes good ones) and get a non-"K" i5 or i7.

Thanks for the reply.

True from what I have read for right now but with the new gaming consoles being geared toward AMD most articles I read says AMD 8 core will preform better on those new games..I know thats in the future so could or could not be true

Guess may better to wait 2 months and see what games new console titles get released on PC to see the benches?

 

[country2]

Intel also planning on 8 core cpu...Haswell E

http://www.techpowerup.com/185719/haswell-e-intels-first-8-core-desktop-processor-exposed.html?cp=2

Nice but too bad its months from now so nothing to buy. Wish he could wait but you know how teenagers are he's driving me crazy. (OK maybe you don't but sure you've heard)

 

[frozentundra123456]

Thanks for the reply.

True from what I have read for right now but with the new gaming consoles being geared toward AMD most articles I read says AMD 8 core will preform better on those new games..I know thats in the future so could or could not be true

Guess may better to wait 2 months and see what games new console titles get released on PC to see the benches?

AMD is more competitive in newer games, but an i5 or i7 is much more well rounded. It will perform near (or still better) to an 8 core FX in heavily multithreaded games, while considerably faster than AMD in games that are more dependent on single core performance. In fact WOW and GW2 both perform much better on intel.

And dont bother waiting for an 8 core intel chip. A quad core i5 or i7 will be a great choice, while the 8 core Haswell E will be a very expensive chip, for sure over 500.00, and probably only available as the 1000.00 extreme edition.

 

[DaveSimmons]

True from what I have read for right now but with the new gaming consoles being geared toward AMD most articles I read says AMD 8 core will preform better on those new games..I know thats in the future so could or could not be true

The consoles use AMD CPUs with very slow cores (1.6 GHz) -- less than half the speed of Intel i5 / i7 desktop cores, plus they are slower clock-per-clock so the difference is even greater.

4 x i5 cores can run 8 threads faster than 8 x AMD console cores.

The AMD "Mantle" API you might have read about is for an AMD graphics card, not for an AMD CPU.

 

[country2]

The consoles use AMD CPUs with very slow cores (1.6 GHz) -- less than half the speed of Intel i5 / i7 desktop cores, plus they are slower clock-per-clock so the difference is even greater.

4 x i5 cores can run 8 threads faster than 8 x AMD console cores.

The AMD "Mantle" API you might have read about is for an AMD graphics card, not for an AMD CPU.

From what I've read games will be designed to utilize Mantle since AMD owns the gaming console cpu now. Since many games will be released from the console platform to PC they will be geared toward AMD and 8 cores.Also his video card is a GCN Architecture card so will support Mantle. I'm just trying to match everything up.

Guess either buy best performing cpu now which is intel or take a chance on the future and go AMD 8 core....

side note..Also although Mantle is built with GCN-architecture cards in mind, it does not require them.

 

[mfenn]

Just because the consoles use 8 very slow AMD cores does not mean that a desktop AMD 8-core will outperform an Intel quad-core. The Intel cores are just plain faster, even in perfectly-threaded benchmarks like Cinebench. Games do not have an extremely regular workload like Cinebench does, so Intel will keep the advantage.

So I guess what I'm saying is don't try to outsmart yourself. You have the budget for an i5, so just get an i5.

Core i5 4570 $190 AP
ASRock H87M Pro $73 AP
G.Skill DDR3 1866 8GB $68 AP
Total: $331 AP

For some extra pep, optionally add an SSD like the Crucial M500 120GB for $95.

 

[country2]

Thanks all for replies...

Well decided to save him some money...never mind he wants to spend money (dang teenagers) so decided to go with a intel set up looking at parts mfenn posted

 

[mfenn]

Sounds good. Let us know how it goes or if you have any other questions.