Why would/did you buy an AMD CPU?

[Ketchup]

I built a fairly economical rig for a guy recently. I put an i3 in it. I really couldn't find anything better for the money on the AMD side.

And once you go high-end, AMD wouldn't enter the thought process at all.

So what are they offering now? The last time I had an AMD rig was when they were offering a chip that really competed.

 

[VirtualLarry]

The only reason to go with Intel on the lower-end rigs is for power-consumption reasons. The FX-6300 is the same price as an Intel i3, but has 6 cores, as opposed to two, and games just as well, and is faster for heavy multi-tasking.

 

[jacktesterson]

X4 750k + fm2+ board for $120. needed a cheap pc for a while. pushes a 7850 at 1080p just fine. a88x fm2+ chipset has usb3 and sata 6. Hard to beat for this price

 

[SlowSpyder]

Long: I had a Phenom 1090T at 4GHz and change, it was already fast enough for my needs. I still game, but I generally am an RPG/hack & slash and strategy gamer. I play the occasional first person shooter, but I'm definitely casual in that genre. So when the upgrade bug was getting to be too much to handle (I had my AM2+ board for over five years at that point!), AMD had recently released their FX-9xxx CPU's. I figured it would be an upgrade to a CPU/system that already was generally fast enough for me and in an odd way the hobbyist in me wanted to build something to run such a ridiculous CPU. I thought it'd be fun to build something to really push the clock speed on an FX eight core and see what it could do. And there is a little bit of AMD fanboy left in me that figured if this is their last big performance part, why not.

Short: I wasn't building for bang for the buck so much as for the hobby of building a rig.

And besides, everyone has a 4GHz+ Sandy/Ivy/Haswell.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I bought quite a few AMD combos from Microcenter, when they had Athlon II quad-cores for $100 with free mobo, or dual-cores for $50-60 with free mobos. RAM (DDR2) was kind of expensive though. ($100 for a 2x2GB kit)

(More recently, I've been picking up IB Celerons for $35 ea at MC, and cheap H61 boards.)

Much more recently, I picked up a very full-featured A85X Biostar mobo for $60, which I paired up with a cheap FM2 CPU. Couldn't resist.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

The only reason to go with Intel on the lower-end rigs is for power-consumption reasons. The FX-6300 is the same price as an Intel i3, but has 6 cores, as opposed to two, and games just as well, and is faster for heavy multi-tasking.

Not fair to count AMDs half-cores with shared good-bits as "cores" but not count Hyperthreading.

Although frankly, if you need multi threaded performance so bad that you'll accept the single-threaded hit, you're building a system with a very specific job in mind and probably should be looking at cutting corners elsewhere to get a beefier all-around CPU.

Or porting your code to OpenCL.

Most people are doing lightly threaded stuff most of the time.

 

[coolpurplefan]

I bought some AMD processors to save money. The last time I bought a processor, it was an Intel however. It all depends on the price/performance and what I want at the time I buy.

 

[dragantoe]

I had 2 friends go with 8320's. one uses an r9 290 and the other a gtx 780. They wanted a high end gaming rig, and an 8320 with a gtx 780 is a lot better for gaming than a 4670k with a gtx 770.

 

[UConnHusky1]

The laptop I use when I travel or if we have to bring it to Uconn has a AMD A8-5545m.

 

[escrow4]

The only reason to go with Intel on the lower-end rigs is for power-consumption reasons. The FX-6300 is the same price as an Intel i3, but has 6 cores, as opposed to two, and games just as well, and is faster for heavy multi-tasking.

Except not:

http://www.techspot.com/review/787-thief-benchmarks/page4.html

6350: 45

i3: 54

Any console port that needs singlethreaded grunt will suffer on an FX, and there are plenty still out there. And its more like a tri-core with those 6 modules. FX doesn't make any sense up against a Haswell i5, the price difference is irrelevant when you get poor performance matched with an obsolete chipset/socket.

 

[CHADBOGA]

I had 2 friends go with 8320's. one uses an r9 290 and the other a gtx 780. They wanted a high end gaming rig, and an 8320 with a gtx 780 is a lot better for gaming than a 4670k with a gtx 770.

Why not get the 4670K with a gtx 780?

Not much of a friend. :hmm:

 

[CHADBOGA]

Looking at AMD's current line up, the circumstances where AMD's offerings make any sense, are such tiny niches, that I can only imagine that anyone going with AMD CPU's today, are doing so either out of sheer ignorance or a warped sense of "morality".


First, thread crapping is not allowed. Second, you insulted a large number of users, myself included.
Knock it off
Markfw900
Anandtech moderator

 

[Vesku]

Not fair to count AMDs half-cores with shared good-bits as "cores" but not count Hyperthreading.

Although frankly, if you need multi threaded performance so bad that you'll accept the single-threaded hit, you're building a system with a very specific job in mind and probably should be looking at cutting corners elsewhere to get a beefier all-around CPU.

Or porting your code to OpenCL.

Most people are doing lightly threaded stuff most of the time.

Honestly I wouldn't be able to tell my current i5 3470@3.8GHz computer from my former 1090T@3.8GHz in a blind test without the assistance of running canned benchmarks or enabling in program stat counters.

It does use less power though and there is the extra single thread performance if needed. The 1090T is only 30pts ahead of the 3470 in Cinebench R15, FX 6300 will be something like 100pts ahead of the i3-3220 at stock.

i3 is still in a weird spot for dedicated GPU systems if you aren't sensitive to an extra 50-100W of desktop power use.

 

[Ken g6]

The main thing AMD really beats Intel at, currently, is video encoding. There's also the 7-zip bench, but who does that much compression? Note that it's not really fair to compare these two processors, as the 4770k is ~$150 more than the 8350. (Though a Xeon E3-1230 V3 is closer to that price range.) Plus an overclocked 8320 is an 8350 (or a 4.7GHz 9590 if you're lucky), while an overclocked 4670k isn't a 4770k, and you can't overclock a Xeon E3-1230 V3.

FX-6300 is good, but not better than a Haswell i3 for most things, and certainly not better for apps with few threads like Skyrim.

Last time I bought an AMD was 2003, though I recommended a cheap Athlon II to my Mom a few years back.

 

[JDG1980]

Well, I got a pretty good deal at Micro Center a couple months ago (FX-8350 for $149.99, plus an extra $40 off with a motherboard bundle deal). The main reason I chose this over an i5 Intel-based system is that it supports ECC (which the consumer Intel processors don't). I wanted this feature so I can repurpose it as a server (ZFS-based NAS) after my next upgrade.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

The only reason to go with Intel on the lower-end rigs is for power-consumption reasons. The FX-6300 is the same price as an Intel i3, but has 6 cores, as opposed to two, and games just as well, and is faster for heavy multi-tasking.

lets not be too deceptive here; its 6 threads vs. 4 threads, the FX6300 isn't ever close to being 3x faster that I'm aware of, the biggest wins on AT bench are right around ~62% faster, which lines up more with having 50% more processing threads than 200% more "cores".

Although I do agree with the general assessment that intel on lower end is for those who want efficiency. I know i certainly wouldn't want to be stuck with an i3 stuck at stock clocks for my main rig, and would much rather have the 6300 and then overclock that chip as high as it could go to help make up for the lack of IPC prowess and enjoy the brute force in heavily threaded tasks.

 

[MongGrel]

I did about 20 years ago because they were cheap and were applicable at the time, a few Thunderbirds.

Really haven't since then I guess, over a few issues.

 

[tweakboy]

The prices are low vs Intel, but shouldnt there be a reason for that. ?

 

[Centauri]

Because I hate Intel and because I believe in the direction AMD is headed, and I'm willing to kick them a little coin on their way to getting there.

 

[MentalIlness]

I went with my FX 8120 because it made the 990FX Sabertooth board $89.00 from Microcenter. I went for the 2500K, but they were OOS. In other words, the Sabertooth I paid for, and the CPU was "almost" free. Of course, that was in 2012.

 

[Bradtech519]

I got the CPU(FX 8350), Cpu cooler, motherboard, and RAM in my sig for $300. That price weighed against the performance/cost of an I7 rig. Plus, I have been an AMD fanboy for a while. I admit it, but know that the I5/I7 kills it when you don't factor in price. Intel runs away with raw performance.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Not fair to count AMDs half-cores with shared good-bits as "cores" but not count Hyperthreading.

To be fair, I wasn't trying to be biased, I was only going by what each respective company markets those chips as.

Intel doesn't market the i3 as a quad-core, they market it as a dual-core.

Likewise, AMD doesn't market the FX-6300 as a triple-module CPU, they market it as a six-core CPU.

 

[R0H1T]

Looking at AMD's current line up, the circumstances where AMD's offerings make any sense, are such tiny niches, that I can only imagine that anyone going with AMD CPU's today, are doing so either out of sheer ignorance or a warped sense of "morality".

Why do people think that your next door Microcenter prices are indicative of the prices commonly prevailing over the rest of the world ? The latest AMD cpu+mobo combo is anywhere between 50 ~ 75% of the price(depending on the mobo) of 4770K + compatible board while delivering equivalent(to its price) level of performance & I suspect most other nations, where there are any number of taxes to be paid, we have the same issue !

 

[Mondozei]

I had AMD cpus in the mid-2000s, because they were great. Since 2009, not so much. But one thing I like is that they dont change socket as often, one of my friends went with a 8350 with an old am3 mobo(one of those you could turn to am3+ via BiOS update). Saved him a lot of cash, especially as he is using mantle in BF4 now.

My rig is more expensive but he is getting a LOT more in terms of price/perf. Since CPU progression has stagnated i might get an AMD cpu next in 2-3 years, they could start to catch up plus they have more cores which will be much more utilized in the new console generation

 

[BSim500]

I seriously considered an FX-8350, but went with an i5-3570 for the same reason I previously went from a Pentium 3 -> Athlon 64 instead of a Pentium 4 - I don't want a unwanted space heater chucking out +90-100w surplus heat in the middle of summer, and the $20-30 one off purchase saving is a false economy over 3-4 years of TCO inc energy usage. Even an FX-4300 burns up more energy than an i7 under load. Crazy disparity. AMD are great for their price / perf, but they really need to get their power consumption sorted out. As in "halved overnight across the board".

When I got my i5-3570, there wasn't even any "Intel premium" since it was listed at exactly the same price as the FX-8350, yet can Turbo to 4.2GHz whilst pulling less than 60w (measured) in Prime. Likewise the difference in cost between an FX-8350 and an i5-4570, which still beats it across a spread of games is far less than vs a 4670K. You could even drop down to an i5-4440. K chips are great for enthusiasts but you don't need a i5-4670K to beat an FX-8350 in most games, at which point the price/perf ratio falls to nothing once you add up 2-4 years of electricity costs.

In fact, at time of writing an i5-4570 is $159 and an FX-8350 is $179 at MicroCenter... :whiste: