before moving to 990fx

I

inelegant

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 11, 2008
Messages
101
I saw that a 8 core is not really a 8 core cpu and wonder about the gaming performance it can provide me with as it might have fixed the issue of how many cores it uses I havent really looked in to that so im going ahead and asking first because I seen this other quad cpu that is cheeper but has a higher clock speed on it.

AMD FX-4170

I am only interested in gaming and find it more impelling to upgrade but my motherboard isnt compatible anymore. My budget is around $500 to upgrade the MB and CPU.

My pc has a Phenom II 965 Deneb and Asus Crosshair III Formula with 2 sticks of 2gb 1600 CL7 memory and nothing has been overclocked. The system runs win7 ultimate service pack 1.

Ready to buy 4 gb sticks of memory and seems like everything can be upgraded so might as well get this done right now rathen then later.

CPU
AMD FX-4170 Zambezi 4.2GHz (4.3GHz Turbo)
or
AMD FX-8150 Zambezi 3.6GHz

Mobo
GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD5
or
ASUS Sabertooth 990FX

I can only go with 1 of each so help me decide.
 
true, the bulldozer 8 cores are not true 8 cores. each module is comparable to about 1.5-1.7 cores. similar to hyperthreading but better theoretically. as far as the FX 4170 goes i'd say no its probably a bad choice to replace your 965 with. that 965 is actually faster IPC(important for gaming) wise then the 4170. only upgrade i'd go with from the 965 would be the 8120 but even that i'd say wait until piledriver is released in Q4 of this year.

personally your best option if you get a 990FX is to keep that 965, get a good heatsink and overclock it to 4Ghz or higher. otherwise stick with what you have and just overclock it to 4Ghz and you should be good to go til the end of this year.
 
8 GB memory is a must for gaming IMHO.

If you want to get the most from that processor get better cooling as well (I take it you have a stock cooler?). Yet if you don't know a thing about OC'ing then you should start tweaking and reading up on it.

BTW WHAT! is your GPU? That is going to be the most important/noticable upgrade because you have a decent Quad CPU already m8. I really think 8GB memory, a newer GPU and a better CPU cooler would get you where you want to be...
 
teletran8 said:
8 GB memory is a must for gaming IMHO.

If you want to get the most from that processor get better cooling as well (I take it you have a stock cooler?). Yet if you don't know a thing about OC'ing then you should start tweaking and reading up on it.

BTW WHAT! is your GPU? That is going to be the most important/noticable upgrade because you have a decent Quad CPU already m8. I really think 8GB memory, a newer GPU and a better CPU cooler would get you where you want to be...
Click to expand...

8GB is NOT a must for gaming. maybe if you were using vista but it is definitely not a must with windows 7. i mean hell i use 3 gigs and i've never once maxed it out even having 20 tabs open in chrome in the background while play supcom:FA and its the biggest memory hog game out there.. 4 gigs is more then enough for any game out there. but i agree with how cheap DDR3 is theres no reason not to go with 8 gigs but its definitely not a requirement.
 
If you have $500 to spend you'd be crazy not to get a 2500k and a good 1155 board, unless your absolutely a die hard AMD man. I upgraded my son's rig last year right before the 25-2600k's came out with an X6 Phenom and I'm still kicking myself for it.

At the end of the say your Deneb isn't a horrible gaming chip, but as the above poster said, its not a big upgrade going to a Bulldozer chip, (if any) and your budget would put you into a 2500k rig easily, (that would be a huge upgrade).
 
Mmhmm.. I am definitely all for amd and always considered intel to be overpriced and ridiculous so I guess ill wait to see how the piledriver delivers.

AMD Memory Entertainment Edition 4GB

Before I wanted to grab a few of these because my sticks are 2gb but then gave it some thought and decided to pair the ram with more 2gb sticks and then im willing to bet that there wont be any noticeable difference. Even with the bigger stick sizes the voltage and latency timings.

PS - My video card is a R5870 Lightning. It will max out most of the games playing using it without crossfire although I figure not worth the money so it's lonesome and besides cf would need liquid cooling setup which has been placed in the closet for a several years now.
 
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First, I don't understand your logic, and second, you need to read some reviews.

So the logic part first....
You say you read that the 8 core Bulldozer isn't really 8 core. Pretty true, it has 4 modules and 2 threads per module, so it's more like a quad with hyperthreading.

Then you say because you don't like what you hear for that issue you want to now get a FX-4170 instead. Do you realize that the 4170 is a Bulldozer cpu also? It just has 2 of the 4 modules disabled. It's more like a dual core with hyperthreading.
Changing your direction from 8150 to 4170 doesn't change the underlying architecture.


Second, you really need to read up on the benchmarks and pay close attention to what games you play. Bulldozer cpus at stock speeds, and in many cases overclocked also, lose to the older Phenom II cpus and also i3/i5/i7 cpus.

This review: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-fx-pentium-apu-benchmark,3120-9.html
shows a 4 Ghz Phenom II beating all the Bulldozer cpus in most games.
Overclocking what you have would probably give you better performance than the 4170.

So my opinion is to get more ram, overclock, and wait for Piledriver if you want to stick with AMD. Either that or move to Intel now while your parts have some resale value.
 
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