I'm finally looking to do a new build. I was thinking of an intel i5 but money is tight so going with an AMD. Don't know too much about them so my question is for the price (both being $159.99) which would be the best...AMD FX 6100 or AMD Phenom II X975 Black? I picked a motherboard Asus M5A99X. Also looking for a good video that is the best bang/buck for the CPU/motherboard posted. I'm replacing my XFX 680i/Q6600 SLI 9800GT's, also I currently play Crysis, TF2, CS, HF2, WoW, Star Wars old republic if that info helps.
fx 6100 if you plan on keeping your cpu for the next few years. The extra $40 for a I5 would be worth it.
I would pull for an i5. it's worth the $40 more and as much as i love AMD, the FX-6100 trails behind the older phenoms; so if you REALLY don't have the money for an i5 2400/i5 2500, get the phenom II, it will fit in both AM3 and AM3+ motherboards without a need for BIOs update and is known to be faster per core.
Also, going for any of the AMD options won't net you a significant enough performance over an overclocked Q6600...
Also, an i3 processor is still as fast/ faster than the phenoms even in multi-threaded apps.
ALSO still Lol, ivy bridge would be a better investment for the future than Piledriver.
If you need some proof, Tom's hardware did a great comparison:
"Pushed as far as they can go on air, no AMD CPU can touch a stock Core i5-2400 in the same benchmark suite."
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106.html
Also, going for any of the AMD options won't net you a significant enough performance over an overclocked Q6600...
So should I just look into trying to overclock my Q6600 instead?
Yes, I would. The Q6600 has been known to be a pretty good overclocker and the 680i motherboard is definitely no slouch either. As long as you have good memory and a good power supply, all you need is a good cooler. If you can get the Q6600 to around 3.5ghz it should be well within the performance of a Phenom II 975.
If you don't think you have a decent cooler, I would suggest getting one that's both compatible with LGA 775 socket and LGA 1155 socket so when you do upgrade to ivy bridge, your cooler would be ready too.
This way. instead of spending $300 on new but slow CPU, memory and motherboard, you only spend about $50 and save the extra $250 until you have enough for a decent ivy bridge platform.
Better yet, I would still strongly suggest Sandy Bridge.
sandy bridge, even on lower end still beat a lot of amd's chip that are comparable in price, its pretty sad when sandy celeron dual cores are beating Phenom II dual cores,
they are also typically use less power, and you will have a much better upgrade ability, the top tier of AMD tops out with mid-range Intel performance, my i3 2100 is on par if not better in some cases than my 955BE overclocked
Well guys, thank you for the advice. I got the q6600 to 3.0 for now, looking at getting a water cooler before I go higher. So instead of doing a new build I'm going to max this one out. Figure I'll move to a 64 bit OS, more RAM and a new video card. Again, thanks for the help!
Sadly my i3 2120 seems to be about 30% better in gaming performance than the 955BE