• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

E4500 vs. Phenom 9600

S

swanysto

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 3, 2005
Messages
340
So right now I have an E4500 that tops out at 3ghz. I want to wait for Nehalemto come out but I am bored with my E4500 at the moment. I really don't want to pay 200 for a processor right now, which is why I am asking about the 105 dollar 9600. I just want a quad core to play around with till the end of the year.

Will this processor outperform my E4500 in any scenario? I mostly play HL2 games which are known to be more CPU reliant than the newer games are. I do a bit of encoding and such but nothing to be picky about.

I am neither an AMD or Intel fanboy, and I know that Intel is dominating right now. However I do not need the best right now, just something better than my E4500 for cheap.

Bottom line, is the Phenom a better chip than my E4500? If it is I will buy it.
 
As with any quad vs dual discussion, the presence of two extra cores will make the 9600 faster if the applications make use of it - encoding will certainly show an improvement, most gaming won't show a huge effect. Team Fortress 2, for instance, only uses one core, and a 9600 comes out a little behind an E6750, which your overclocked CPU has a higher clockspeed than (although yours has half the cache, which will probably narrow the gap slightly):
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/13633/5

So it will outperform it in scenarios which are highly multithreaded, but the Phenom's weaker per-core power (especially as Phenoms don't overclock hugely) will mean it falls behind in those which can't take advantage of the extra two cores.

Of course, replacing an E4500 with a Phenom will also involve getting a new motherboard, unless you happen to have an AM2 one already, which will increase the price.
 
I was in a similar position. My e2160 @ 3.1ghz I was getting bored of... so I went to a Phenom 9550 and couldn't be happier. I have it running at 2.86 GHz right now on my gigabyte 790fx motherboard and it runs like a champ. I definitely noticed a performance improvement in general usage over my overclocked 2160; however, it wasn't as if the 2160 was a slouch by any stretch of the imagination.

The way I like to think about it is that AMD has solved the chipset i/o problem (and some would argue that it's even overkill), but the way I see it... I/O was always one of the biggest bottlenecks in any system (hard drive).... so I'd rather go with the company that has solved the i/o bottleneck problem. CPU's won't be an issue for games, so I'd rather spend less on a CPU and more on a GPU if that's what I'm going to be doing; and it is what I'm doing. Pretty much any dual/quad core CPU you buy today will be plenty for gaming at high res.... GPU's, on the other hand, will require more horsepower.

Just my $0.02
 
TF2 uses 1.5 cores. it offloads physics to a 2nd core, but nothing really beyond 50% usage of a 2nd core.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top