I've had an interesting predicament regarding my daily desktop. My long cherished 990fx setup is dying, either the board or processor. I ran my 8350 hard for something like a year and a half via a gigabyte 990fxa ud3, revision 4, the good version. Hard overclocks that I could never settle on, were a normality for me. But now the failing stability of either the board or processor has forced my hand on a new setup. I have intentions to re-purpose either component of my 990fx motherboard and cpu combo, depending on which one is stable, in a 3d program workstation for my father. But that led to my predicament, what is my next toy?
My 8350 has served as a solid work and play machine for a good while now, but I feel like buying into the platform again is almost a waste. Why? I've watched as my 8350 started to shutter under the demands of the latest games. DX12 is coming and that would improve matters, but I have a feeling it is more of a delay of the inevitable more then a breath of new life into this three, going on four, year old platform. All technology has a time when it becomes nonviable for efficient work use, and I don't think DX12 will do enough to compensate for the IPC of bulldozer. It can spread the load out and even make the load easier, but its not going to make a bulldozer core faster. The core isn't going to miraculously gain 20% IPC and magically become competitive with haswell, broadwell, and soon skylake.
I do like AMD, I really do. As a company they at least seem to have good intentions; however money driven they are at least seems to be less then average. But as a consumer I had to look at the two platforms and weight pros and cons. And when looking at the pros and cons, you can't with with an unbiased mind say AMD is the better every day choice. I compared the 8350 and the cost of getting comparable performance to a Xeon 1231-v3, and there wasn't a comparison to be made. I simply couldn't get the same performance, and the price of a whole new setup didn't make sense with the performance hit I'd be taking. And not just performance, the feature set. My new Intel setup consists of a Z97 extreme 6 from AsRock, of course a Xeon 1231-v3, and a Samsung sm951 for a boot drive. I can now have a boot drive that reads at 2000Mbps. That's insane, and its not something I can do on a 990fx board with selling my first born to get a hold of that unicorn of a board Asus made called the 990fx sabertooth revision 3 or whatever it is. If and more likely when I invest in a fury card, there is no chance a 8350 can keep up with it. If my 8350 was on the verge of bottlenecking my lonely 770 4gb, whats it to do with a card more then twice the power. It would be a waste. With that extreme 6 from asrock, I can run my Xeon 1231-v3 at 3.8ghz max turbo at all times. With the Noctua D15 I'll be keeping in use from my 8350 build, temperatures will never be an issue.
Temperatures. Everyone and there mother that's recommended the 8350, including me on damn more then a couple occasions has glossed over temperatures and tdp. People one of the key things that ran my 8350 into the ground was its power draw. It heated up my room to unbearable temperatures when I made the move from the basement to my bead room. It's something that the tech community as a whole glosses over, because we've grown to deal with gaming in 85f rooms. I don't want to be sweating when I play battlefield because of the room, but because I'm so immersed in the game that I feel pressure to win. That's something I've never had in my more then toasty room. Before you right the smart ass comment, yes I have air conditioning and yes its turned up as much as it can be without making the rest of my family freeze in their rooms. I run fans and open windows every time I want to play, if weather and allergies permit. It turns gaming into a chore, and that makes me not want to game. Truly I have stopped playing cs because my room is too hot to bare, it sounds stupid but I'm not kidding. It sucks, and I don't want to deal with it if I don't have too.
So this is my reasoning, and now for the change. I'm still writing this from my 8350 rig as the z97 parts are in limbo aka the us postal service. Soon I'll have parts in hand to truly compare against my old rig. I can't do a benchmark suite on this system as its too unstable, but I'll definitely be comparing against other cpu benchmarks results that I can find online with the new system. This has been a fun journey, but I'm about ready to turn in my AMD membership card.