Which I5 do you recommend for me

the amd a10 is using a geforce 210, i dont use it for gaming its for other purposes. the i3 has a 7870 that i bought on sale in january. i was going to replace the cpu then but i saw that card and couldn't resist.

and i also have a 460 gtx that i am going to sell.

both cards gave me horrible performance and i was told it was because of the i3.
 
mongols are coming said:
i currently own a i3 on the pc i am on now and alot of the games i play (borderlands 2, batman ac, bf3) run poorly on it.
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Which one? I imagine most i3s still have enough muscle to run those games at decent settings. Are you still running that 7870 you bought & mentioned in the other thread? Something's not adding up.

Edit: Ninjaed! OK, which i3?
 
The iGPU in the A10 is significantly stronger than the Geforce 210. It's on par with the GT240 at the very minimum, probably matches the GTS 250.

What do you mean by horrible performance? What settings are you trying to play at? Which i3 do you have?
 
Tsumi said:
The iGPU in the A10 is significantly stronger than the Geforce 210. It's on par with the GT240 at the very minimum, probably matches the GTS 250.

What do you mean by horrible performance? What settings are you trying to play at? Which i3 do you have?
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its an i3 2100.

like i said before it was all i could afford then. i figured i would buy something better in the coming months and that time has come.

the games i tried were batman ac (the game slows down to a crawl after a few seconds) bf3 (will be at 60-70 frames per second then drops to 20-15 fps and stays there) borderlands 2(which just runs horrible the entire time)

i asked freinds of mine and they said its bottlenecking

i tried both video cards on different monitors and they both do the same thing. any older game runs fine though

edit: i put that 210 in there and just forgot about it because that pc is for other means like i said
 
mongols are coming said:
its an i3 2100.
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That really shouldn't be the problem. That chip isn't exactly cutting edge, but it shouldn't be the cause of generally very poor performance. What are the rest of your current specs? Have enough RAM? Updated drivers for the vid card? No malware hogging resources? What happens when you experiment with the graphics settings?
 
Your 7870 is about on par (give or take a bit) with my GTX 570 in almost all games...and my 570 shows it age in B:AC @ 1080p, medium-high to high settings with PhysX turned on, as one example.

Before jumping on an i5, I'd recommend you strongly consider selling it and getting a 660ti, 670, or 7950 Boost instead. Paired with an i3, it would make a pretty damn good budget gaming PC.
 
I'd vote K version as well.

igp4000 + has more resell value when you do upgrade.
 
NLW said:
That really shouldn't be the problem. That chip isn't exactly cutting edge, but it shouldn't be the cause of generally very poor performance. What are the rest of your current specs? Have enough RAM? Updated drivers for the vid card? No malware hogging resources? What happens when you experiment with the graphics settings?
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i had 8 gigs. i keep it at normal-high and turn AA off.

and i keep every driver up to date. and clean of malware. i always get the same drops in frames
 
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mongols are coming said:
i cant decide which one to go with. can you guys help me?

a few things:

1. im trying to keep the price under 220. i dont want to go higher

2. im willing to get any of them as long as they just run the games right

3. i never ever ever ever ever overclock and never will.

i know i forgot something here but i dont know which. if you need more info ask
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If you don't overclock, then go with the i5 3450
 
Skillz said:
If you don't overclock, then go with the i5 3450
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Everything else seems to be good. It still strikes me as odd that the 2100 would be the culprit, but I could be wrong. If you want to try upgrading the chip to see if it works, I'd go with the quoted suggestion above.
 
mongols are coming said:
its an i3 2100.
..the games i tried were batman ac (the game slows down to a crawl after a few seconds) bf3 (will be at 60-70 frames per second then drops to 20-15 fps and stays there) borderlands 2(which just runs horrible the entire time)

i asked freinds of mine and they said its bottlenecking
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hmm.. that doesn't sound right.

I actually did a bunch of reading on the i3 2100 gaming performance previously. I was researching if it was better than the AMD cpus for the same price bracket.

Here's what I found:

J Macker said:
Relax guys. I didn't get an FX-4100. The phenom II was out of stock. I bought a couple of i3's as shown in my picture.
Sure, I can post some pictures of the builds I'll work on it during the next few days.

This much discussion also compels me to actually benchmark as well.

I also read that Borderlands 2 is based on the Unreal Engine 3. The most recent game in benchmarks that uses Unreal Engine 3 is Batman 1 & 2 and Mass Effect 3. Unfortunately, there are very few CPU reviews that include Mass Effect 3 for these chips. There's actually very few processor reviews that have Batman either.

Here's one review that doesn't have the i3, but it shows that the FX-4170 is comperable to the Phenom II x4 980
This review shows the i3 2100 beats the Phenom II x4 980 in many games.
Although Crysis isn't an Unreal engine 3 game, this review shows the i3 2100 is faster than the Phenom II.
In Hawx 2 the x4 980 is faster than the i3 2120, and the Fx-4100 is at the bottom.
This one shows the FX-4100 get dominated by both the Phenom II x4, x6 and i3.

i3-2100 faster than FX-4100 by a large margin in World in Conflict.

And last, but probably the best review for comparisons, the i3 2100 is faster than the x4 970 and 975 BE in Fallout 3, L4Dead, FC2, Crysis, DA:O, Dawn of War 2, WoW, SC2 and Civ 5.
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an i3 could potentially be a "bottleneck", but you should certainly be getting smooth performance with a 7870.

I will be receiving my 7870 tomorrow and I have an i3 system, so I could plug it in and test it.
 
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Lower the settings. The i3 shouldn't be a bottleneck in BF3 unless you're playing 32 and 64 player maps.

Batman: Try turning off PhysX if it's on. I noticed this in Alice: Madness Returns with an i7 920 @ 4 ghz and a 6990. If there's a bunch of junk on the ground, CPU spikes to 100% and FPS drops into the 10s until I leave the area with PhysX at high.

Borderlands: Same thing as Batman.
 
J Macker said:
hmm.. that doesn't sound right.

I actually did a bunch of reading on the i3 2100 gaming performance previously. I was researching if it was better than the AMD cpus for the same price bracket.

Here's what I found:



an i3 could potentially be a "bottleneck", but you should certainly be getting smooth performance with a 7870.

I will be receiving my 7870 tomorrow and I have an i3 system, so I could plug it in and test it.
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how did it compare to a fx4100? i was set on buying a 4 or 8 core but everyone kept urging me to get a intel board and just upgrade the cpu if it dosent work out for me
 
What CPU cooler are you using, and do you have CPU temperature monitoring program? Whats the temp when you start running games.?

Sudden framerate drop sounds an awful lot like temperature throttling.

that i3 processor is a very solid processor.... i think there is something else going on.
 
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i tried the temp thing when i first got it. it has the stock cooler and dosent overheat.

can it be a bad install of windows? or something off in the bios?
 
Are you sure? You should check while gaming.... Coretemp (make sure to decline all the crap ware it tries to install) works okay.

The stock cooler is notorious for having a loose push pin or something.
 
i tried it again. it only went up high once. and with another program which had it 10 lower than when it overheats

the cpu stayed the same.

i have the msi twin frozr 7870
 
So how hot exactly? like are we talking like 50c or like 80c. ? Also, how hot is the GPU while you're gaming? Does it have adequate ventilation?
 
it got to i think 49. im going to pick up the new cpu tommorow. if they got pc cases for cheap again i might buy one or add another fan. it has 2 right now

a blue one in the back and one in the front
 
That i3 2100 + 7870 setup you have should net you great performance. A lot of people are still running high-end video cards with their Nehalem i7's and Phenom II's from 4-5 years ago that are still very venerable CPUs. Even though you can't overclock it, your i3 should be just as faster or even faster especially for gaming because of the Sandy Bridge IPC boost. While getting a faster CPU will net you a few more frames, an i5 or an i7 will NOT make a noticeable improvement to your gaming performance nearly as much as you think unless you intend on running two cards. Most games nowadays are very GPU dependent and as long as you have a moderately fast CPU your video card isn't going to suffer from a bottleneck.

I'd suggest making a new partition on your drive and install Windows 7 or 8 onto it. Install the latest AMD CCC drivers onto a fresh Windows installation to see if perhaps something in your old OS environment is hurting your performance. Also, I'd remove that GT 210 from your A10 setup as another user mentioned that the integrated video card (HD7550 I think) on the APU is actually pretty decent.
 
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GigabyteZ said:
That i3 2100 + 7870 setup you have should net you great performance. A lot of people are still running high-end video cards with their Nehalem i7's and Phenom II's from 4-5 years ago that are still very venerable CPUs. Even though you can't overclock it, your i3 should be just as faster or even faster especially for gaming because of the Sandy Bridge IPC boost. While getting a faster CPU will net you a few more frames, an i5 or an i7 will NOT make a noticeable improvement to your gaming performance nearly as much as you think unless you intend on running two cards. Most games nowadays are very GPU dependent and as long as you have a moderately fast CPU your video card isn't going to suffer from a bottleneck.

I'd suggest making a new partition on your drive and install Windows 7 or 8 onto it. Install the latest AMD CCC drivers onto a fresh Windows installation to see if perhaps something in your old OS environment is hurting your performance. Also, I'd remove that GT 210 from your A10 setup as another user mentioned that the integrated video card (HD7550 I think) on the APU is actually pretty decent.
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Agree. I think something is going down with your main CPU. You shouldn't have that poor of framerates.
 
tomorrow i am going to check the fans and move some of the hardware around.

i will try to get a different installer for windows because i think that can be culprit. when i got this machine games like skyrim and spec ops the line ran smoothly and now i cant run anything newer without the stupid hiccups

if i do get a new cpu i might also get a case too if they are cheap (they are always on sale)
 
The case shouldn't effect the temps that drastically unless it literally has no fans or ventilation. Save your cash for your CPU or GPU.
 
went to the store and picked up a i5 3570k. they also had a 2500k and a 2400 and a i7

kinda regret it, if i didnt need to buy a hard drive too i coulda gotten that i7 but oh well
 
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