AMD Athlon II X4 630 for a cheap all-round build?

Hardware CPU
1

Hi there my good hearted fellows! I call upon thee for thy expertise!

So, a friend of mine wants to get himself a desktop PC. For many years now, he's been sticking to a laptop for multiple reasons: It's cheaper to own just one PC, and if you gotta have a laptop, it's gonna be a laptop; His greatest passion is probably writing. He writes thousands of words every day while he commutes, eats lunch and what not; and lastly, up until this point, he hasn't had too ambitious needs for gaming, but he does love video games and he does want the opportunity to pick up any game that might interest him and be able to play it. So the time has come to build him a desktop PC, and he has enlisted me to help him do it.

So here's the deal, this PC needs to be as affordable as possible, it needs to perform reasonably well in a number of tasks, like every day usage and mid-low-range gaming, and we really just need to make the most of what we have, which brings me to the Athlon II X4 630. I have one of these processors sitting in a GA-870A-D3 motherboard with 4 gigs of DDR3 to spare. My biggest concern is that the Athlon will bottleneck the graphics card to a point where gaming performance will suffer significantly, because of its lack of L3 cache as well as the age of the architecture. The scratch build I've been pondering on includes putting an R9 380 in there, or more likely, waiting for the RX 460 to release, as well as slapping a Hyper 212 on the Athlon and churning out a higher clock speed, but would it even make sense pairing one of those graphics cards with the Athlon, or would it be more beneficial to do something else entirely?

Another option lies in another older rig I have sitting around with an i7 920 in an AsRock X58 Extreme with 6 gigs of RAM and an aftermarket Zalman cooler, but I'm not sure the single threaded performance of the 920 will suffice, and 8 cores is quite abundant for a user who won't do any photos, video or content creation beyond writing word documents. Sorry for the long post, looking forward to hearing your suggestions!

TL:DR: Is the Athlon II 630 even worth considering for mid-low-range gaming these days, provided one has one alongside a motherboard and RAM to fit, or should I look to a completely different approach?

2

Wait for the AM4 APUs man, unless you were just giving him that stuff

3

I am pretty much giving him that stuff. I figure it's best to find a use for it while it still has some, but is it powerful enough?

4

probably the i7 would be better overall I suppose, but ya, the AM4 APUs would probably be best for him whenever the hell they launch

unless he was going to have to buy some kind of GPU, which you then wouldn't want the APU system

5

The i7-920 will be the better bet for gaming fluidity. The Athlon was a wonderful budget chip in 2009, but it can't truly hold up anymore with the lack of multiple instruction sets, L3 cache, and efficient threading.

In every respect the i7-920 will trounce the Athlon II. Both are even FSB overclockable, and clock for clock the i7-920 will just continue to beat the Athlon.

6

The i7 option is definitely the better option of thw two, but I literally just yesterday built a friend's friend a system using all parts I had laying around one of which was the 630 Athlon. The finished build looks like this http://pcpartpicker.com/list/vbvpgL
He was coming from an HP pavilion with a Pentium E5800

7

That does indeed look very similar to the build we're considering. Is there any chance you could post a couple of benchmarks? I'd like to know what performance in a game like GTA V would be, given the CPU intensive nature of the game. Either way, thanks for the input!

8

Another possibility hinges on the two of us and a third friend of ours moving out together. We could essentially use the Athlon X4 build for a Steam in-home streaming PC and the i7 920 for my friend's build. That would be a fairly ideal redistribution of hardware, but it does hinge on what the future holds. Thanks for the input though, I'll definitely consider what you've said.

9

I can't unfortunately, I gave it to him that same day. I can say that I did test it with a 550 ti getting very playable framerates (20-50 FPS) on Overwatch using the "MEDIUM" setting preset. The CPU is about the same as the intel q6600 infact it performs a little better so looking for benchmark videos shouldn't be hard.