FX8120 or i7 860?

R

Reanimation_LP

Gawd
Joined
Sep 9, 2005
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Struggling to decide which way to go.

I have a FX8120 CPU, M5A97 mobo. I also have an i7 860 CPU, P55 mobo.

I'm pairing it with a GTX 970 GPU, an SSD, and 16GB of RAM. Either one will be cooled and OC'ed with a Corsair H60.

Which would be better really for gaming?

Building for a friend of mine who wants to get into PC gaming (she has just a dinky laptop with an iGPU) as a birthday gift.

Well, the i7 860 would be the Xeon equiv as the RAM I have is unbuffered ECC RAM (4x4GB 1866MHz from Mac Pro 2013).

Thanks in advance for your input :)
 
No clear winner in the FX8120 vs i7 860 battle when you're stock vs stock.

The i7 860 will probably suck less juice but will lose in heavily threaded games.

I suppose you should build whichever is cheaper for you to build.

I compared the following links that show the two in the same ballpark figure, but some benchmarks are not apples to apples and you have to sort of interpolate the results.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/the-bulldozer-review-amd-fx8150-tested/8
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/...core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested/20
 
IMO the i7 is a much better processor all around. Definitely better for gaming.
 
If she's gaming then IPC tends to be a bigger factor than threadcount.

That makes the i7-860 superior especially if it is overclocked - 4GHz is not unheard of.
 
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