For about a year now I've been saving up and looking into finally buying a desktop (laptop gamer here...) but I keep having problems between whether to get the FX-8350 or one of the A-10 processor. Recently my build was
FX - 8350
MSI 970 AM3+ gaming mobo
R9 280 crossfire compatible
HX-850 Corsair PSU
8 gb Corsair Veng RAM
240gb Samsung SSD
2TB WD Harddrive
Corsair H100i
Bitfenix Ronin case
Pretty solid setup I think, but when I was looking at the parts again today, the graphics card states it uses PCI-E 3.0 and my MOBO only has PCI-E 2.0 slots. I didn't give this a second thought until now considering all of the builds I see on pcpartspicker and youtube, but will I have significant issues keeping this setup? Since the 3.0 has double the performance as a 2.0, will I still be able to run 3 monitors? I really wanted the FX series processor compared to the A-series because of the processing power considering this will also be a workstation (autocad/solidworks). All answers are appreciated!
PCI-E 2.0 has no performance issues against pci-e 3.0, if you render you might get your times a few seconds worse or the game might load a little bit slower (due to the textures transfering from the main ram to the vram...) but its only secons, the fps drops might vay between a few and none.
Well first of PCIE 2.0 and 3.0 are completely backwards and forwards compatible with each other. The link will just operate at the speed of the slowest device so in this case PCIE 2.0. That being said it isn't a bottleneck. A modern GPU won't even fully saturate a PCIE 2.0 X8 slot . So the generation of PCIE is pretty much pointless. It will work fine.
Go with the 8350 it will perform much much better than the APU.
My suggestions though. Get a 990FX motherboard. The 970s aren't recommended with 8 cores. Plus if you ever want to use multiple GPUs you can't on a 970 chipset board. Plus the power delivery is much better and the 8 cores need a lot of juice. Plus if it is an MSI 970-G4x then those boards are shit and will fail. Stay far away.
This is the MSI motherboard in question. The G4x is a totally different motherboard, but this board does say it supports 2-way crossfire. Other than the power delivery is there anything wrong with the board? (if you could give your reasons it would be appreciated)
Nope that is a very different board you are right. It is excellent and uses some form of wizardry (prob a PLX chip) to give you the extra lanes for running multiple GPUs.