AMD Athlon X4 860K Black Edition or......?

Hardware Hub CPU
1

I just upgraded my MSI FM2 motherboard to a FM2+ one (the MSI A88XM). This was the only one I could find in uATX format that offered PCIe 3.0 on both the PCIe slots, so I can do VGA passthrough in KVM, with Linux as the main OS and Win as the VM guest for workrelated applications. At the moment it's running a X4 740 CPU, but it will be upgraded as well, to a FM2+. At first I thought of getting the X4 860K, seems to have a great price/performance ratio and about the best/fastest FM2+ CPU I can get (in fact, as I understand it, it's the 7850K without the GPU). But now there is the 7870K, but it's nearly double the price of the X4. Not counting the GPU (which I don't need), it the newer 7870K a 'better' (faster, better for VM) CPU than the 860K?

Regards, Angelo

2

the 7870k is an overclocked 7850k and the athlon has the same cpu as the 7850k so... stick with the athlon

3

Thank you for the reply. That was my first reaction as well, but how about IOMMU support in the X4? IOMMU is something I need for the VGA throughput in KVM and I can't find anything about support for this in the athlon. The couple of sources I can find that list supported CPUs only show the Phenom, FX and the A-series of AMD..... No mention of the athlon X4 series.