fx 8370e opinions

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walwalka

2[H]4U
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Sep 10, 2006
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My first question would be, is it worth it? I have a i7 920 and the board is toast.

But some back story, basically my x58 board is shot. It's works, some of the time and I just want a working machine. I do light web browsing and gaming, I play GTA V but it don't expect or need it to run on ultra 60fps+ only. The high settings I'm playing it at now is are just fine, I will be keeping the 750ti for a while. I also play some CS:GO and CS:S, maybe some LoL from time to time. Nothing serious.

I want to reduce my power consumption so and go up in performance, right now I don't have native sata 6gp/s or usb 3.0 so I have to run add-on cards. Those things being integrated to the board is a bonus as well.

I have a microcenter near by and the 8370e is $139 with $40 off the board.

For $250 with tax out the door, is it a worthy enough upgrade?
 
walwalka said:
I just want a working machine.

I want to reduce my power consumption so and go up in performance
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If you just want a working machine, then I'm sure the 8370e will be fine. However, I suggest you spend a few bucks more and get an i5-4690k combo. The 8370 is only going to be a side-grade at best, both in power consumption and performance. If anything, I suspect it would be worse. Just my .02
 
walwalka said:
8370e worse in power consumption? It's 95w tdp and the 920 is 130?
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TDP of the CPU alone doesn't tell the whole story. The AMD platform is gonna draw enough extra juice in terms of its NB and SB config that your "power savings" will most likely be moot (particularly if you overclock it). Also, you sort of provided a conflicting set of desires. You didn't just say you wanted reduction in power consumption, you said:

walwalka said:
I want to reduce my power consumption and go up in performance
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I don't think an 8370e is going to give you what you're describing unless you actually meant what you said earlier in your OP with:

walwalka said:
I just want a working machine.
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Basically, you can go with the AMD and get a working machine. But, the 920 and 8370e are very closely aligned in performance characteristics, which is why I described it as a side-grade. If you want better performance than the 920, then you'll have to overclock that CPU and that will erase the power savings instantly.You also mentioned having newer SATA and USB tech integrated.

Based on almost all of the things you're talking about, I think you'd do yourself a service to go with an i5-4690k or something along those lines. Once again, just my $.02.

Maybe Dangman is around and has a better suggestion... :D
 
walwalka said:
8370e worse in power consumption? It's 95w tdp and the 920 is 130?
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The 8370e will show some improvement in power consumption and moving away from add-in cards to integrated components should help a bit as well. The 4690K is even more efficient, but it will still take a while to save the difference in your electric bill. If you are going to overclock the 8370e, then your efficiency gains will disappear because they can potentially eclipse 130W when overclocked.

General performance improvement isn't going to be that great. You basically have eight threads to work with either way. For day to day and light gaming use, you probably won't mind the experience, and you won't be bottlenecked by the CPU with that GPU.

Here is a limited comparison: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/47?vs=1340 The 920 is so old a lot of the tests have been reengineered since its release.
 
At this point in the game anything AMD doesn't make a ton of sense. If you have a micro center nearby, grab a i5 and cheap z97 board. Even the cheapest locked i5 and cheapest h81 board will be infinitely more power efficient and per core speed will rock the AMD setup in games
 
Buy a motherboard. AMD and Intel are slacking off. But seriously there isn't much difference in the performance of Intel or AMD. But Intel does have slightly better single threaded performance for when you feel nostalgic and fire up the first StarCraft game.

Really if you want to buy something for real I would wait until the first week of August. That's when the new Intel chips launch.
 
In nearly all cases a Haswell quad core Intel CPU will out perform that AMD CPU even when overclocked. It's only with heavily multithreaded applications that the AMD CPU can stretch it legs and you don't seem to do anything that will benefit from it.

For $250 I would get an i5 CPU. Although I would spend the extra ~$60 for the Intel i5 4690k ($200 at Microcenter) and a Z97 motherboard (They have a few in the ~$110 price range). I see that you overclocked your i7-920 so I'd assume you'll be overclocking now.
 
Well I wouldn't get an i5 because of a lack of Hyperthreading for DX12 which launches on July 29th. No point in buying something that is going to be irrelevant in less than 2 weeks. I'm saying this from the standpoint of this is [H]ardocp and most people want as many features that they can afford. If the OP only has i5 money then it's fine. But if he can afford an i7 I would spend the extra money and get Hyperthreading support for DX12.

Personally I'd wait for the new Intel chips to launch. :)
 
cageymaru said:
Well I wouldn't get an i5 because of a lack of Hyperthreading for DX12 which launches on July 29th. No point in buying something that is going to be irrelevant in less than 2 weeks. I'm saying this from the standpoint of this is [H]ardocp and most people want as many features that they can afford. If the OP only has i5 money then it's fine. But if he can afford an i7 I would spend the extra money and get that for DX12.

Personally I'd wait for the new Intel chips to launch. :)
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HT has been around for over a decade now. Games didn't take advantage of it then and I doubt they'll take advantage of it now. Sure DX12 is supposedly supposed to reduce the API overhead on CPUs and that doesn't really guarantee you'll see a performance boost from HT alone. It's still going to be up to the game engine and developers to take advantage of it.

With that being said; if the OP can wait until Skylake launches then I too would recommend him to do that. However, if he needs a system now then an i5 4690k will be a great upgrade to his i7 920 and not a side grade like his other option.
 
Well DX12 games will use all cores and threads to feed the GPU. So a i7 HyperThreading Intel processor will have 2x as many threads to talk to the GPU as a normal i5 under DX12. Under DX11 only one core on a processor can talk to the GPU at a time. That's why you normally see CPU usage in games where only one core is maxed out and the rest are barely awake. So I'm just saying that the OP should seriously consider an i7 or just wait for the new processors.
 
cageymaru said:
Well DX12 games will use all cores and threads to feed the GPU. So a i7 HyperThreading Intel processor will have 2x as many threads to talk to the GPU as a normal i5 under DX12. Under DX11 only one core on a processor can talk to the GPU at a time. That's why you normally see CPU usage in games where only one core is maxed out and the rest are barely awake. So I'm just saying that the OP should seriously consider an i7 or just wait for the new processors.
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You do realize the OP plays OLD games that wont benefit at all from this not to mention he intend to keep a 750 Ti as his GPU.

DX12 is irrelevant to him and any games coming out in the next couple years.
 
Skillz said:
You do realize the OP plays OLD games that wont benefit at all from this not to mention he intend to keep a 750 Ti as his GPU.

DX12 is irrelevant to him and any games coming out in the next couple years.
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Well the new Fable Legends game is DX12, F2P, and is a MOBA. His 750ti should benefit greatly from DX12. For him not to at least think about DX12 wouldn't be in his best interest. :)

Also remember all the game engines have already integrated DX12. So the DX12 path will be available to developers. Now will they want to utilize it is the only question. The Witcher, Batman, and Project Cars all have DX12 paths waiting for an OS.

I'm just saying that if he has the budget room, seriously consider a HyperThreading CPU.
 
He will see more performance improvement in games (that he plays and future games) with a GPU upgrade. DX12 will not match that.
 
Skillz said:
He will see more performance improvement in games (that he plays and future games) with a GPU upgrade. DX12 will not match that.
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Agreed, but his motherboard is dying. I don't think he can fit a GPU into the price difference between a i5 and a comparable i7.
 
On the gaming side it is kinda hard to see what would benefit people the most. In DX12 cpu IPC should matter less and extra cores should matter more.

The whole Mantle/DX12/Vulkan games are quite dependant on the engine the game is using and what is their goal with the game if you look at something as plants vs zombies it runs under Mantle (should be DX12 as well?) but it will not push the same number of batches as BF4 does even tho it uses the same frostbite engine.

Having said that I would be very surprised if we see games (gaming engines) pushing well beyond what current 8 core cpu can handle.
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HyperThreading is pretty irrelevant for gaming now and it will remain so with DX12, Mantle, and Vulkan. There were already tests shown that the performance didn't scale much beyond 4 cores inside DX12/Vulkan. You get a few extra frames but four cores is more than enough to properly feed even the most highest-end GPU's. Don't forget that even though some games under DX11 had decent multithreading (like Frostbite 3 with support for 8 threads), the API was still bottlenecked by having only a single submission queue for feeding the GPU, amongst other factors.
 
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