Why would/did you buy an AMD CPU?

[blackened23]

I'd buy a Kaveri APU over an intel CPU if I was looking at making a portable mini-itx gaming computer. It would have to be for light gaming obviously, but the 7850K is going to run circles around the HD 4600 option and should best the Iris Pro options too.

Would it run circles around a G3220 + H81 motherboard (112$) + a 150$ discrete GPU (750ti or R9-260X)? Total cost, 260-270$. 7850k total cost, 190$ for CPU and 100$ for overclockable motherboard.

Nope. I think not. In fact, the above G3220 + dGPU option would in fact run circles around the 7850k setup while also being cheaper. (if you want benchmarks proving this, simply ask.)

There are good APUs but the pricing on the 7850k is utterly absurd for what you can get, a 6300, 750k, G3220 or i3 with a dGPU would literally destroy the 7850k in PC gaming and these options would all cost similarly. The 7850k , meanwhile, costs near 190$ for the CPU alone. I think in terms of budget gaming, perhaps a Richland on sale would be a better choice, or the better choice would be a 6300 with a dGPU. Making the case for the 7850k is tough given current pricing.

You have to look at cost effectiveness. At $150, an FX-8320 isn't bad at all. Yeah, it'll lose to an i3 in a fair number of games, but both an i3 and an 8320 will give fine performance in most games given the type of GPU you'd pair with a chip in that price range.

Price effective? Maybe, but the 8350 isn't price effective. Look. The FX8xxxx chips are inconsistent, this is a fact. I don't know why anyone would argue otherwise. Now with that said, I've stated many times now that AMD *does* have decent budget CPU options. They have some decent stuff especially if you have an existing motherboard that works. But with the 8350, specifically, you're getting into intel core i5 pricing territory and the i5 will give you consistent performance with superior IPC. I've seen people say that an FX8350 can run "anything you throw at it". What kind of statement is that. A Pentium can run anything you can throw at it. What does that mean exactly. Now you can make the cost effectiveness argument for a ton of AMD chips like the 6300, 760k, and lower end richland CPUs and I would never blink.

Again, I reiterate, AMD does have some good choices in their lineup which are budget and cost effective. I don't disagree. But when I see arguments in favor of the 8350, I have to do a double take. At the pricing for the 8350 the case becomes much harder to make IMO.

run everything you throw at them.

This statement. The ultimate in being vague. Will the 8350 lose to an i3 at times? Yes. Does the 8350 run everything? Yes. Does the i3 run everything? Yes. I don't even get this statement. Run everything. What.

Anyway, consistency is still an issue and the 8350 will in fact lose to an i3 quite a bit in games. Like it or not, IPC still matters, so the case for 8350 becomes a little difficult. Unless the buyer gets an incredible deal or already had a motherboard in hand. Then it might makes sense. Then again, if there's the one app that someone runs and they run nothing else, then the 8350 might make sense. But if you're running a broad spectrum of applications the i5 is just going to be superior due to IPC and consistent performance. So the way I see it is, AMD has some good choices at the sub 100$ range, but once you're in the 180$+ range with the FX8350 and the 7850k? Those CPUs don't make sense. Because with the 8350 you can get an intel i5 for the same price. That i5 is a better more consistent choice. Or with the 7850k, you can get a pentium/i3 with a dGPU for a comparable cost. And i'm sorry with a dGPU, a pentium or i3 is going to run circles around the dual core 7850k. The intel platform with a discrete GPU would also in fact be cheaper or similar cost wise - and faster than the 7850k platform as well. Which is truly confusing.

So essentially the recurring theme here is AMD does have some compelling options. Once the price range gets close to i5/i7 territory (for the FX8xxxx and 7850k specifically), everything becomes much less compelling. I can't see how anyone would prefer those over the comparably costing intel platforms.

 

[Yuriman]

You re stretching the numbers to defend an irrelevant point based on twisted numbers.

A i3 HW is 15% at most better than a SB so how could it be at spitting distance of previous i5s wich are 100% or so more powerfull than their dual core siblings..??.

Indeed with such twisted logic anything is better or worse than itself of anything else, just get your numbers out of the hat along with rabbits..

Taken from the Overclockers.ru:

i5 2500 advantage over i3 4340

Non-gaming
Winrar 4.2: 29%
Java Micro: -1%
Excel: -11%
XnView: 11%
Xilosoft video converter: 25% (faster rate)
Xilosoft audio converter: -19%
Pinnacle Studio: 10%
Photoshop: -4%
Cinebench: 37%
Average: 8.5% faster

 

[Yuriman]

Overclockers.ru didn't have benches with a discrete GPU, the next best thing I could find was the i3 4340 vs i5 3330 on Xbit.

i5's advantage:
Batman Arkham: -2.6%
Civ5 BNW: 15.3%
F1 2013: -0.6%
Hitman Absolution: -4.8%
Metro LL: 10.8%
Sleeping Dogs: -0.9%

Average: 2.7% faster

I realize BF4 isn't on that chart, but of the games tested, the i3 fares pretty well.

 

[Abwx]

Taken from the Overclockers.ru:

i5 2500 advantage over i3 4340

Non-gaming
Winrar 4.2: 29%
Java Micro: -1%
Excel: -11%
XnView: 11%
Xilosoft video converter: 25% (faster rate)
Xilosoft audio converter: -19%
Pinnacle Studio: 10%
Photoshop: -4%
Cinebench: 37%
Average: 8.5% faster

Nicely picked , Winrar 4.2 was badly threaded , as well as java micro,
actualy the only threaded softs are Xilisoft wich was surely AVX2 optimised, all the rest set apart CB is badly mthreaded or simply single threaded, hardware.fr say 25-30% depending of the HW frequency...

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/901-3/performances-applicatives.html

 

[Phynaz]

Seriously?

That s not the thread but let see where the 8350 does stand :

Did you just try to compare AMDs current top of the line processor to Intels last generation??? Jeez.

 

[Abwx]

Did you just try to compare AMDs current top of the line processor to Intels last generation??? Jeez.

I guess that you know that current i3s are not as good as a 3770K for instance, the conclusion is obvious though but seems that it escape a few people understanding.

Edit : i used this review rather than HW review as for some reason Tech Report, or rather Trolled Report, did reduce most FX scores by 15-20% while increasing almost all Intel scores that are on the graph i posted, chek by yourself how the numbers were conveniently re arranged from a review to another :

FX8350 Review starting with the first bench :

http://techreport.com/review/23750/amd-fx-8350-processor-reviewed/10

Haswell review starting from the same bench :

http://techreport.com/review/24879/intel-core-i7-4770k-and-4950hq-haswell-processors-reviewed/12

The trolled benches start from the first one , they didnt even bother to bury the things, i guess that HW had to look good whatever the means.

 

[Yuriman]

I guess that you know that current i3s are not as good as a 3770K for instance, the conclusion is obvious though but seems that it escape a few people understanding.

Just so you know, I have a Haswell i3 in my 2nd rig (one the wifey uses). I know exactly how fast it is or isn't. I for one do upgrade CPUs occasionally, and have a few Haswell chips floating around in the family, so there's a fair chance it will end up with an i5 in a year or two. For my use-case the i3 seemed more appropriate, but I'd argue there's still a case for the FX-8xxx.

 

[Abwx]

Just so you know, I have a Haswell i3 in my 2nd rig (one the wifey uses). I know exactly how fast it is or isn't. I for one do upgrade CPUs occasionally, and have a few Haswell chips floating around in the family, so there's a fair chance it will end up with an i5 in a year or two. For my use-case the i3 seemed more appropriate, but I'd argue there's still a case for the FX-8xxx.

As satisfied as you are from your HW others are fine as well with theirs FX8xxx and can tell you how fast they are or not.

FX has the qualities of its shortcomings, i mean it can perform not as well as a i3 in a dual threaded soft but what once this soft is just slightly updated?

What will be, or actualy already is, an i3 if anything else than a CPU that get worse and worse by the months.?.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Well to answer the question on the op:

Why would I buy AMD -- only if price was the main concern, I didnt care about single threaded performance or power consumption, and I was using some of the apps that AMD cpus excel at.

Did I (buy one)? I bought an athlon XP back in the day because it gave better performance and was more efficient. The very same reasons that I *would not* buy an AMD processor today. For the uses that I am interested in, intel is faster, more efficient, and comparably priced. I bought a Core 2 duo and am now running a SB i5 and for my use, I see no reason to go AMD.

That said, the AMD fans dont need to get defensive. Their processors are not terrible, they will run every app, etc. etc. It is just that intel does better what I want to do.

 

[Yuriman]

As satisfied as you are from your HW others are fine as well with theirs FX8xxx and can tell you how fast they are or not.

FX has the qualities of its shortcomings, i mean it can perform not as well as a i3 in a dual threaded soft but what once this soft is just slightly updated?

What will be, or actualy already is, an i3 if anything else than a CPU that get worse and worse by the months.?.

The i3 suits my needs for the following reasons:

I already have a fast, overclocked Intel quad to do my "heavy lifting". The i5 is my file, web and game server, and the machine I encode on.

My wife primarily uses the i3 system to play games with me and to watch stuff. Both systems have identical 7850's in them and perform about the same in the games we play, which are generally not AAA titles and thus not well threaded.

We keep both PCs in our bedroom as we're in college and have roommates. The i3 sips power and doesn't add significantly to our cooling bills or make the room (as) uncomfortable as a higher wattage chip. We put the i5 system to sleep in the evenings and use the i3 for media consumption - it has the larger screen.

The i3 is on a platform for which I do have an upgrade path. I've been building mostly Haswell (and admittedly a few AMD APU) systems for my family and at some point it's likely to receive a hand-me-down quad, at which point I'll sell off the i3.

The price was right.


There are similarly good use cases for an 8320, just not mine.

 

[blackened23]

Well to answer the question on the op:

Why would I buy AMD -- only if price was the main concern, I didnt care about single threaded performance or power consumption, and I was using some of the apps that AMD cpus excel at.

Did I (buy one)? I bought an athlon XP back in the day because it gave better performance and was more efficient. The very same reasons that I *would not* buy an AMD processor today. For the uses that I am interested in, intel is faster, more efficient, and comparably priced. I bought a Core 2 duo and am now running a SB i5 and for my use, I see no reason to go AMD.

That said, the AMD fans dont need to get defensive. Their processors are not terrible, they will run every app, etc. etc. It is just that intel does better what I want to do.

Yep same here. When AMD had just the better product myself and most of my then friends were in fact using Athlon chips. In those days AMD was a better platform/CPU than the P4 + Rambus RDRAM. Those days are long gone now though and intel generally has the more compelling product if you're seeking great performance. It is what it is. As a consumer, the better product in the Athlon days was AMD. Now, it's intel. AMD just has to compete on price now, and some of their CPUs effectively do that at the budget end of the spectrum (110$ or less). The case becomes much more difficult when you enter i3-i7 price territory. Even at the low end, intel has some great competing products in their celerons/pentiums as well.

Like frozen said, they're not terrible CPUs. As a consumer, the choice for the 180$ and up AMD processor isn't favorable to AMD and generally favors intel right now except in certain scenarios (already own a mobo, etc). But if you're running one specific app that favors the AMD, then that's a factor. For most people, though, they're buying based on the wide spectrum of games and applications. Which isn't favorable to AMD at the upper end of the price spectrum at all.

 

[shady28]

I guess that you know that current i3s are not as good as a 3770K for instance, the conclusion is obvious though but seems that it escape a few people understanding.

etc...

This illustrates things a bit better I think.

Summary :
Total time to complete a battery of timed benchmarks by Tom's Hardware
i3-3225 : 3095s
FX-8350 : 1577s
i5-2500K : 1820s
i5-3470 : 1629s

Tom's didn't have an i3-4xxx to compare against, but reviews linked to previously indicate it's 10% faster, which is in line with Haswell vs IB in general.

So lop off 310s from the i3 time and you get ~2800s.

 

[Phynaz]

I guess that you know that current i3s are not as good as a 3770K for instance, the conclusion is obvious though but seems that it escape a few people understanding.

Edit : i used this review rather than HW review as for some reason Tech Report, or rather Trolled Report, did reduce most FX scores by 15-20% while increasing almost all Intel scores that are on the graph i posted, chek by yourself how the numbers were conveniently re arranged from a review to another :

FX8350 Review starting with the first bench :

http://techreport.com/review/23750/amd-fx-8350-processor-reviewed/10

Haswell review starting from the same bench :

http://techreport.com/review/24879/intel-core-i7-4770k-and-4950hq-haswell-processors-reviewed/12

The trolled benches start from the first one , they didnt even bother to bury the things, i guess that HW had to look good whatever the means.

I don't even understand what you are attempting to say here. I just see more of you calling everyone that doesn't agree with you a troll. I guess when you don't have any argument you need to deflect away from the facts.

 

[Ketchup]

I don't even understand what you are attempting to say here. I just see more of you calling everyone that doesn't agree with you a troll. I guess when you don't have any argument you need to deflect away from the facts.

And you know the best way to get rid of someone you don't care for? Ignore them. I think most of us here know how these things have panned out over the last few years. Wrong or right, I don't see opinions changing here.

 

[Gikaseixas]

Got accused of getting defensive but that's not the case at all. The thing is that people who haven't tried AMD tech lately are the most vocal here and that's because of the extreme bias they have against such products and nothing more.

Now let's have a civilized conversation for a change shall we? I stated many times before that Intel performs better for the most part but AMD does have it's strong areas too and for someone who's currently living outside the US, the AMD hardware is most of the time much much cheaper to get. When I looked at 3570K prices vs FX 8350 prices, the difference meant I could buy extra memory and a bigger hard drive so I went FX. At the time that was the deciding factor.

Last year I was back in the US and guess what I got? An i7 because I knew how good of a deal I was getting compared to most other countries. Now I have both and I know first hand that both chips excel and are not night and day different. The mobo chipset on the AMD for me is what's lacking because I could notice a slight better performance out of USB3, Sata, etc.

When it comes to things such as gaming, it plays very well and I would even say it's more than enough. If you have a 120hz monitor and your aim are high FPS I recommend Intel and nothing else. If you have a 60hz like most do today I don't se what the fuss is about. Again I use both and I know first hand how good both are.

 

[Abwx]

I don't even understand what you are attempting to say here. I just see more of you calling everyone that doesn't agree with you a troll. I guess when you don't have any argument you need to deflect away from the facts.

It apply perfectly to your post who is an ad hominem attack and nothing else,
it doesnt contain the slightest technical point and if you didnt understand ask first for clarification.....

 

[BSim500]

You re stretching the numbers to defend an irrelevant point based on twisted numbers.

A i3 HW is 15% at most better than a SB so how could it be at spitting distance of previous i5s wich are 100% or so more powerfull than their dual core siblings..??.

Indeed with such twisted logic anything is better or worse than itself or anything else, just get your numbers out of the hat along with rabbits..

I know you were responding to Yuriman, but he is in fact correct in a number of cases. Some games show up to a whopping 40% boost from Ivy Bridge -> Haswell i3:-

Metro Last Light:-
i5-4670 = 76.9fps @ 3.4GHz
i3-4340 = 72.7fps @ 3.6GHz
FX-8350 = 62.5fps @ 4.0GHz
FX-6300 = 53.9GHz @ 3.5Ghz
i3-3240 = 51.2fps @ 3.4GHz
http://img.hardcoreware.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/metro-last-light-fps2.png

72.7 vs 51.2fps = 42% difference (or 34% increase in fps adjusted for 200Mhz clock disparity). That's huge. And it's not a "stretch", just reality that Haswell's wider core really makes the most of hyper-threading more than previous generations, and tends to be more noticeable on i3's than i7's. BF4 is also up to 23% faster not 15%. Likewise comments like "I guess that you know that current i3s are not as good as a 3770K for instance" are pretty silly as they're not even remotely in the same price range. I think Yuriman's point though was that Haswell i3's have indeed improved to the point of running many popular games virtually toe to toe or sometimes better than older low-end i5's, eg, i5-3350P, / i5-2320, etc, which is also true.

Nicely picked , Winrar 4.2 was badly threaded , as well as java micro, actualy the only threaded softs are Xilisoft wich was surely AVX2 optimised, all the rest set apart CB is badly mthreaded or simply single threaded, hardware.fr say 25-30% depending of the HW frequency...

And that's real life my friend. The number of perfectly threaded apps & games that 100% scale with each doubling of cores can be virtually counted on two hands outside of synthetic benchmarks. There are plenty of popular games out there, where there's barely 3% difference between an FX-4320 vs FX-8350 vs an old i3-3220, so why should you be surprised that Haswell i3's run many games just fine? Ultimately the whole argument boils down to ideology (just waiting... and waiting... and waiting... for every game & app to be 100% flawlessly threaded even though multi-core CPU's have been out for what 8-9 years now?) vs pragmatism (accepting IPC which runs all apps & games faster per core per clock no matter how well / badly threaded, is still king simply because some code is inherently not very well threadable).

"Bioshock Infinite doesn't count because it's not multi-threaded", "Skyrim doesn't count because it's not multi-threaded", etc. If all these top games like GTA IV, Assassins Creed, Civ V, Starcraft 2, World of Tanks, etc, "don't count", if +95% of Indie stuff "doesn't count", if WinRAR & Java "don't count", if Photoshop & Excel "don't count", etc, then maybe the problem isn't with the software design at all, but rather the fact AMD are simply stuck in the same place Intel were with the Pentium 4, and desperately need a new architecture with a +50% boost in IPC, but instead are simply dumping the problem on software coders and demanding the impossible from everyone else?...

AMD's certainly have their place, but it's probably best to not run round calling people who actually own the CPU a "liar" for speaking the truth - on some games there's a huge jump - up to 20%, 30%, even 40% or so - between Haswell i3's and just Ivy Bridge, let alone vs Sandy & Clarkdale's... Presumably that's why certain people in 2014, insist on comparing old i3-2100 / i3-3220 benchmarks vs FX-8350... :sneaky:

 

[AtenRa]

I know you were responding to Yuriman, but he is in fact correct in a number of cases. Some games show up to a whopping 40% boost from Ivy Bridge -> Haswell i3:-

Metro Last Light:-
i5-4670 = 76.9fps @ 3.4GHz
i3-4340 = 72.7fps @ 3.6GHz
FX-8350 = 62.5fps @ 4.0GHz
FX-6300 = 53.9GHz @ 3.5Ghz
i3-3240 = 51.2fps @ 3.4GHz
http://img.hardcoreware.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/metro-last-light-fps2.png

72.7 vs 51.2fps = 42% difference (or 34% increase in fps adjusted for 200Mhz clock disparity). That's huge. And it's not a "stretch", just reality that Haswell's wider core really makes the most of hyper-threading more than previous generations, and tends to be more noticeable on i3's than i7's. BF4 is also up to 23% faster not 15%. Likewise comments like "I guess that you know that current i3s are not as good as a 3770K for instance" are pretty silly as they're not even remotely in the same price range. I think Yuriman's point though was that Haswell i3's have indeed improved to the point of running many popular games virtually toe to toe or sometimes better than older low-end i5's, eg, i5-3350P, / i5-2320, etc, which is also true.

Just because you see a big improvement in ONE game doesnt mean that Haswell Core i3 has the same performance advantage against IvyBridge in general.

Latest BF4 Naval Strike also shows that FX6300 at default not even OCed, is faster than Haswell Core i3. Also Haswell Core i3 4330 is only 5-10% faster than 2 years old Core i3 2100 SandyBridge only due to higher clocks.

http://gamegpu.ru/action-/-fps-/-tps/battlefield-4-naval-strike-test-gpu.html

 

[Abwx]

Just because you see a big improvement in ONE game doesnt mean that Haswell Core i3 has the same performance advantage against IvyBridge in general.

Actualy it could be 100 games it would change nothing, i hold games as one application yet people use them at 50% if not 100% ponderation when hard pressed as if someone would use 100 different archivers or renderers and say that they are 50% of the probable tasks, besides thoses i3 are already maxed out in all thoses favourable games that are surely dual threaded at best, let s see as games get updated if they ll retain this timely advantage against older i5....

Edit : Hardware.fr average in games in the bottom page , we can see that
there s little difference between the successive i3s and the i5s, this
point to games being mainly dual threaded.

http://www.hardware.fr/articles/901-4/performances-jeux-3d.html

 

[Gikaseixas]

Metro Last Light:-
i5-4670 = 76.9fps @ 3.4GHz
i3-4340 = 72.7fps @ 3.6GHz
FX-8350 = 62.5fps @ 4.0GHz
FX-6300 = 53.9GHz @ 3.5Ghz
i3-3240 = 51.2fps @ 3.4GHz
http://img.hardcoreware.net/wordpres...light-fps2.png

Interesting results for the 8350 because xbitlabs shows something very different.

Metro Last Light
FX 8350 = 100.9 fps
i5 - 4430 = 92.3 fps
i3 - 4340 = 76.4 fps
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-i3-4340-4330-4130_5.html#sect0

I agree with you, people should not pick old reviews to make AMD look better. Unfortunately when FX goes up against the best i5 or i7 it falls short, which doesn't necessarily make it a bad purchase. It's a good cpu, just not a great one.

 

[rvborgh]

Just for giggles i finally was able to run the 7-zip benchmark on my dual Opteron 8439SE setup. 19915 MIPs when compressing, 31001 MIPs during decompression (average = 25458 MIPs). I'll have to rerun this again later under Win 7 64 bit this rig is temporarily running under Win XP 32 bit, and XP is likely handicapping it (i am curious by how much).

All in all not a bad value for about $230 worth of old AMD chips... quite satisfied with these K10 cores.

 

[teflon6678]

Back to the OP again, I was rebuilding my PC in the middle of last year, with just the Radeon 7850 GPU and hard drives left intact.

AMD was very much in consideration all the way through, either for an 8320 or 8350, both of which were dropping in price and would have theoretically opened the door for using dedicated cores for encoding video via dxtory quite economically and future advances in multithreading game code on PC.

But in the end I pounced on an i5 3570k. It dropped below my price threshold in the run up to Haswell, but with lower power consumption, pretty good dxtory H.264 compression on the fly and the ability to then get it up an running as a hackintosh were worth it.

That last point has ended up being a pretty great bonus.

 

[Ranulf]

I went with a 8350 recently because its a drop in upgrade to my Phenom 955. I see no reason to upgrade my 2500k system. These days I run two gaming systems, the AMD one being primary.

 

[Erenhardt]

Anyway, consistency is still an issue

Right, but... FX 8350 is very consistent - between 4,0 to 4,2 GHz during turbo. That is pretty damn consistent to me (+-2,5%).

What you meant was: SOFTWARE is inconsistent with how if uses available processing power.
*rest of your usual crusade/rant goes here*

But it is (software) getting better lately. Developers are forced by Multi-core consoles to change their approach. Mantle changes is great example of their willingness to do so.