What's a good cpu upgrade for me?

[Bigsteve606]

I play games like skyrim and Arma, total war so I like games that hadle a lot of ai units with big battles and such. The cpu I have now is an Amd FX 6300

Here are the rest of my specs

GIGABYTE GA-970A-D3P AM3+/AM3 AMD 970 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard

Western Digital Blue WD10EZEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Nvdia Geforce gtx 970

8gigs of ram

500watt psu

Now if anyone could help me find a better cpu that will work with my specs that would be great.

 

[Enigmoid]

Cheap way : Overclock the 6300
Expensive : get an i5

That said skyrim, arma, and total war tend to do very well on intel.

 

[Bigsteve606]

Can you put a Intel cpu in the motherbord ? I thought it was only for AMD

 

[Yuriman]

No, you can't. Unfortunately, games like ARMA and Skyrim need high single-threaded performance and don't use many cores, and FX chips are "lots of cores, low performance per core", so buying a higher-end FX AM3 chip would mostly accomplish getting you more cores and will not improve your game performance very much. By overclocking, you might be able to get perhaps 25% extra performance out of your chip without too much trouble.

Clock for clock, Intel Haswell CPUs are something like 50-60% faster on a per-core basis, so though you'd be moving from a hex down to a quad, your games should run significantly faster.

On games that are not well threaded, this is how Intel chips compare with AMD chips:

In games that are able to more effectively use more cores, AMD fares better:

Note that the Intel "2xxx" chips are from 2011 and are 2-3 generations old at this point.


EDIT: So, although you could buy an FX-9590, it would be nearly the same price as getting a Haswell i5, which would perform similarly or better in what you're doing and draw 1/3 the power doing so. Overclocking your FX-6300 is free and should help a lot.

 

[Bigsteve606]

Wow thanks man that helps alot what's the best program to over clock

 

[DrMrLordX]

I don't think OP's motherboard would take to a 9590 all that well, since it's a 4+1 board (unlike the 970a-ud3). If you feel like doing some system tuning, OP, you could pop in an 8320E or 8370E and try tweaking it for clockspeeds between 4.0-4.5 ghz for an upgrade, but moar cores isn't going to help you much in Skyrim. I don't remember about arma.

I also do not recommend much, if any overclocking of your 6300 on that particular motherboard.

 

[Leyawiin]

I went from an overclocked (4.5 Ghz) FX-6300 to an i5-4690k last summer. My main games are Skyrim and WoW with the Warlords of Draenor expansion. There's no comparison even with the i5-4690k at stock speed. Gameplay is much smoother (more consistent FPS and less hitching). I remember a couple spots outside Whiterun in Skyrim where there would be a very hard stutter with FPS dropping by 10-15. With the i5-4690k there's barely a tiny little hesitation with only a 1-2 FPS drop. With a GTX 780 both games are nailed at 60 FPS everywhere. The FX-6300 couldn't do that. Basically, if you're serious about the best gaming experience upgrade to Intel. I was able to sell my FX and its motherboard for a couple hundred dollars, so it wasn't too expensive to do so.

 

[DrMrLordX]

FX chips just aren't gamer chips. Maybe DX12/Vulkan blah blah whatever, fact is that stuff like Skyrim doesn't use that many cores anyway, and it won't after DX12 either.

FX needs some serious clockspeed and other tweaks to get the minimum framerates up there which OP will not get with that 4+1 phase motherboard.

 

[Yuriman]

Overclocking should be done in bios. It's best to look up a guide for your particular motherboard. A quick google search turns up this:

http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php/742430-GA-970A-D3P-w-FX8350-Overclocking-Guide

And this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWkWCeUoXCY

 

[escrow4]

If you game you want Intel. AMD just doesn't do it anymore at all. A has been mentiioned minimum FPS are horrific and there will be way more stutters and dips than with Intel. I had an FX 6300 when I was playing Saint Row IV which was only a basic console port and the hitching was shocking. i5 minimum, 5820K if you want to splurge.