I am not at the moment looking to do overclocking. Right now, I just want to play games a bit better than I do now. I am potentially open to overclocking but nothing serious at all for a long while until I can afford a good CPU cooler.
I currently have:
AMD Athlon X2 64 4200+ @ 2.19Ghz Radeon HD 7700 (But my Mobo only has a PCI-Express x16 1.0, not 2.0 or 3.0) Windows XP 32 bit
Does this sound like a good spending of my money?
The above, CPU, RAM, and Mobo, come out to be approximately, within +/-$1, $377, after I use the -$10 on the RAM, including Tax and free shipping (From Newegg).
I originally gave myself a budget of around $450 but seeing as how I can get this for around $380, I am willing to go with a little less if I can save in this case about $70 but even saving $50 or so and staying around $400 would be preferable, unless the upgrade is substantial enough to pay another $30.
Thanks so much. Hopefully I can make a choice in the next little while... my computer right now doesn't run things as well as I would like heh
@tacopat Hmm, this is a good deal? I was looking at this earlier, as it at least seems like a good upgrade? I'm not sure about some of these things as I haven't been buying PC parts for a long time heh. So this is a pretty good deal, at the least, in the future I could OC this
Okay so I looked and it sounds like a good deal. I am now wondering if I should get the Gigabyte or the ASUS motherboard with that combo deal at Newegg:
The only thing that stears me away from FX 8350, it is cheaper and I could buy a good CPU cooler and try to OC it, is that it doesn't look like it performs anywhere near as well as the intel chips in CPU intensive games like Skyrim for example. This makes me think that it won't perform as well in something based on Arma II type of graphics engine thing, like when DayZ standalone comes out (if it ever does =/), which is something I really want to play. I can't afford much of an aftermarket cooler for the CPU if I get the 4670k now but in a few months I could invest a little in an okay air cooler and could OC or just wait and get a nice air cooler to do better OC in the future if needed.
Anyone able to address my concerns with the FX 8350 not performing as well in "CPU Intensive games"? I'm afraid the games I want to play the most won't run as well but with the 4670k then all games would be fine in the sense that it would run at least as well if not better than the FX 8350 for games with all other parts of the system the same?
The difference that you see in cpu intensive games between intel chips and AMD chips is mainly due to poor optimization. Now, this difference won't really have any affect in-game, as anything over 60 fps is just fine. And in the future, we will probably see more games being developed with more cores in mind, making AMD chips close the gap. This is especially true with both the Xbox One and the PS4 having high core-count AMD chips in them.
get the CPU/MoBo and ram first, the combo is 50$ off and comes with a 10$ gift card to newegg use the gift card on the heatsink effectively making it 40$, you should get around 4.2Ghz with that heatsink on haswell at least 4Ghz