I had to sell my 3 year old 3570k/GTX970 system a few months ago to pay some unexpected bills and I'm looking to get another nice system put together. Last night at Micro Center I picked up an FX8320e, Asrock 970 Fatal1ty mobo, and a Hyper 212 EVO cooler. I've yet to open anything...wanted to sleep on it, but am feeling a little uncertain about my choice to go AMD.
I know this is the AMD CPU forum. For the entire Pentium 3 and Pentium 4 generation, I exclusively use AMD Athlon CPUs and was really happy about. In 2006 when the Core 2 Conroe chips became available, I was working for an Intel partner and our rep would bring in trays for engineering samples. I landed an E6600, Q6600, and finally a Q9550 for free. Hard to say no to that. I bought my 3570K in May 2012 and was pretty happy with it. So I'm not a fanboy for either team...I have great fondness for AMD and hope they get things turned around. But still feeling a little uncertainty about cracking this 8320E open. I also picked up an open box Sapphire Vapor 280x for $170.
I am a gamer. I play the occasional FPS. Looking forward to finally getting to Crysis 2 and 3. Going to play the most recent Wolfenstein game and the Witcher series at some point. Love Tomb Raider. But my favorite games are things like Diablo 3, Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity, Dragon Age.
More importantly...I am an amateur astrophotographer. I use Photoshop for processing my images and two other programs called DeepSkyStacker and PixInsight. The latter two will utilize every CPU resource they can get so an i7 would be a great fit and probably the 8 core AMD chips. I did some research in communities for those apps are there is little or no discussion about hardware.
Anyway...just wondering if anyone has any input on this stuff or if anyone has gone from recent Intel to AMD for budget reasons. I wouldn't mind doing this as inexpensively as possible but if an i5 or i7 is REALLY the right answer, I'll spend the money.
Thanks for reading.
I know this is the AMD CPU forum. For the entire Pentium 3 and Pentium 4 generation, I exclusively use AMD Athlon CPUs and was really happy about. In 2006 when the Core 2 Conroe chips became available, I was working for an Intel partner and our rep would bring in trays for engineering samples. I landed an E6600, Q6600, and finally a Q9550 for free. Hard to say no to that. I bought my 3570K in May 2012 and was pretty happy with it. So I'm not a fanboy for either team...I have great fondness for AMD and hope they get things turned around. But still feeling a little uncertainty about cracking this 8320E open. I also picked up an open box Sapphire Vapor 280x for $170.
I am a gamer. I play the occasional FPS. Looking forward to finally getting to Crysis 2 and 3. Going to play the most recent Wolfenstein game and the Witcher series at some point. Love Tomb Raider. But my favorite games are things like Diablo 3, Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity, Dragon Age.
More importantly...I am an amateur astrophotographer. I use Photoshop for processing my images and two other programs called DeepSkyStacker and PixInsight. The latter two will utilize every CPU resource they can get so an i7 would be a great fit and probably the 8 core AMD chips. I did some research in communities for those apps are there is little or no discussion about hardware.
Anyway...just wondering if anyone has any input on this stuff or if anyone has gone from recent Intel to AMD for budget reasons. I wouldn't mind doing this as inexpensively as possible but if an i5 or i7 is REALLY the right answer, I'll spend the money.
Thanks for reading.