AMD FX CPU's just suck?

Hardware CPU
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@MisteryAngel
You hit the nail on the head. It's not that the FX line is a series of terrible CPUs, they are just an older design. It isn't that they will instantly drop your FPS just because you install a 780 Ti, 980, or a 290X. That isn't a realistic assessment of how the CPU+GPU ecosystem works in a computer.

The single threaded performance of the FX chips does lack around 2/3 that of the Haswell architecture. Of course keep in mind that Haswell was only a rough 6-8% jump (at best) over Ivy-Bridge, so realistically even that (Ivy-bridge) is faster per core over the FX chips. There are usage scenarios where the FX chips can flex their muscles in multi-threaded workloads, but of course those aren't exactly games. Yet.

But here are a couple things that the FX lineup (mainly the chipsets) have that Haswell doesn't, even in the higher end platforms.

  1. The 990FX chipset which is coupled with the AM3+ socket carries 38 PCI-E lanes maximum. This allows for native support of up to PCI-E 2.0 x8 on four individual slots, giving the option of Quad-CrossfireX, and Quad-SLI. This also means you can have two fully enabled PCI-E 2.0 x16 lanes and still have other PCI-E based expansion options with 1 to 4 lanes each.

  2. The southbridge (SB950) supports hardware RAID profiles 0, 1, 5, and 10. Not exactly an oddity, but a nice addition to have if you want or need RAID support! You can be sure it is available.

  3. And finally, platform flexibility. Anything from an Athlon 170u to an FX-9590 can be used with socket AM3+. This really isn't anything to do specifically with the FX chips, but it is nice if you have a motherboard that gives you grief. You can just ask a buddy to borrow that old Athlon II or Sempron he has sitting on the shelf buried in DDR2, patch your board and drop the brand new FX chip in its place without a fuss.

Oh, a quick little edit here. The FX chips also support up to 64GB of DDR3. If you want that much RAM with Intel, you're looking at an X79 or X99 chipset, (the latter being DDR4, but oh well) so AMD gives a good punch in for anybody who needs a huge buffer of excess system RAM to draw on.

TL;DR The FX platform is getting old, but it by no means sucks. Not any slower than it was in 2012 when it was giving the i5-3570 a run for the money. And hey, it even has some nice little features tagged on in the chipset. Oh, and OVERCLOCK TIL IT MEGAHURTZ!

5 Likes
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tldr. buy the parts for the job that You want the pc to do.
if all you want is one gpu that is less than $500 go amd and save some cash.
and in a few years completely rebuild a new pc for $500

if you want something that will have power to spair spend more on a higher power part like intel.
and rebuild a whole new pc in a few years anyways because youll get addicted to tearing your pc open

1 Like
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Yup what @KuramaKitsune said.

I am currently using an AMD CPU and not even a 5ghz 8350. I am running an old 6100 with an over clock to 3.8ghz, nothing even crazy and I am happily gaming. Teamed it up with a 7870 initially and got a 290 currently. I am happy.

Yeah it could be faster and yes it is old now, hell it was ruled old when it came out by the community, but I game and have no issues. Got it cheap and I have not needed an upgrade and do not plan on one till K12/Zen comes out.

I only game and do no productivity. What people say is based in real fact but they completely over blow the situation. They simply are not that bad. But by the same margin they are not great like an i7k part. Just depends on what you will use it for.

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Jay made a very good video about bottlenecking GPUs in 2013 that covers the topic pretty well

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I would say it highly depends on the type of application your running.. suprisingly for VM and things that require a ton of real cores vs hyperthreading.. it kicks ass.. gaming however is different.. thread performance matters and the FX just completely bottlenecks high end GPUS.... But i would not say they suck. They are still quite capable as everyday mainstream gaming (not high performance or enthusiats) but i wouldnt discredit them to the point of completely sucking. They are good for games such as cities skylines that take advantage of all 8 cores which is cool :D

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1 Like