Athlon 860k vs FX6300

Hi I have been a fan of your YouTube channel for a while and finally joined the site.

I am currently considering a budget gaming pc and having a bit of trouble deciding what to build. My budget is around $700ish.

Due to performance / price for my budget I decided AMD would be a better option than Intel, but now I am struggling in deciding whether to buy an AM3+ mobo/cpu CPU or an FM2+ mobo/cpu. I read on quite a few sites AMD is planning to phase the AM3+ chipset out, and despite the statistics on FX6300 and 8xxx series CPU's seeming much better for gaming than Kaveri or the Athlon 860k, the newer Athlons are still based on the Steamroller architecture which in theory I thought should be a bit better than previous generation architecture.

In terms of speed without overclocking the differences seem negligible, however between the cores / L2/L3 cache etc all seem better on the older generation FX series CPU's.

For my budget though the two I compared were FX6300 and the Athlon 860k where the price difference was about $30 with the FX6300 costing just a little more than the Athlon. But the whole discussion online about AM3+ being phased out makes me wonder whether this is worth getting and assuming it is phased out will FM2+ ever have a worthy cpu competitor equal to the FX series of CPU's or capable of reaching at least Core i5 levels of performance in future?

I am going nuts with this debate of what to buy and despite performance benchmarks in favor of the FX6300, the Athlon 860k seems to do fairly well with its quad core vs. the hex core.

My question may seem oriented more towards these above cpu's but more importantly what does AMD want to do next? are existing products going to retain there upgradable nature?

are older generations going to be phased out? will there be a 960k or even higher spec cpus based on the steamroller core?

Are they going to nuke their entire inventory of existing cpu's for something totally new in the next 12 months and if so will their new stuff support enthusiast platforms?

Some might be thinking I sure as hell ask a lot of questions for someone building a budget rig, but I think some of these questions are well worth asking, since AMD has had a long history of supporting existing socket types making upgrades much easier.

I personally feel with Kaveri APU's AMD kind of lost the plot or perhaps focused on the mainstream markets but then forgot about the enthusiasts as far as cpu's are concerned.

As for graphics cards AMD still seems to do fairly well pricing their high end cards very competitively and delivering reasonable performance vs nvidia cards. But the same argument cannot be made for their cpu's where intel certainly has the more dominant product.

I have used both intel and amd machines over the past 15years and had a good experience with them both, but I fear now the gap between the two is starting to become very noticed and its becoming harder to support the underdog AMD when their products are struggling for a genuine performance gain or a unique point of difference.

Anyway if you have any advice Tek Syndicate about what to buy and why to buy it please respond and help.

I would go with am3+ for the upgrade ability

As
far as amd future it is hard to say, after Samsung bought them out. I
would hope the reals some decent cpu on a new chip set but if you want
to buy a pc now you need to stop worrying about what will be released and
worry about what is, or you will be waiting forever, there is always
something new coming out.

PS. I am not Logan or Wendell but heres a link to there profiles
https://forum.teksyndicate.com/users/wendell/activity
https://forum.teksyndicate.com/users/logan/activity

Some things to think about;

1) There are no decent ITX AM3+ motherboards available. If you wanted a very small form factor PC this would rule out the FX6300.

2) IPC (single core performance) is better on the 860k, e.g. the FX needs to be clocked slightly higher. My 860k at 4.4GHz scores the same single threaded as my old FX 8320 did at 4.6GHz.

3) The 860k has been simpler to overclock than the FX (no voltage adjustment required to hit 4.4GHz - but this could just be my chips).

4) When DX 12 enabled games land both the 860k and FX 6300 will benefit, but DX 12 will scale to use 6 cores.

5) FM2+ motherboards are slightly more modern than AM3+ boards, although there are now some AM3+ boards with equivilent faeatures.

6) The 860k has no L3 cache but slighty more L1 cache. In my opinion this means the 860k benefits more from higher clocked RAM than the FX 6300 does.

They are both good value chips, I would base your decision on total cost of decent mobo, heatsink and CPU rather than CPU alone but if building a full ATX system I would probably go with the FX.

Hmm interesting,

So is the acquisition of AMD by Samsung just a rumor or has it actually happened? I cant tell based on current articles like this.
http://wccftech.com/amd-allegedly-merge-samsung/

I have read threads such as this one http://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-amd-win-win-acquisition,28403.html
and a few others where people have said that this acquisition makes sense, and on paper it does seem too, additionally though cash strapped AMD would probably leverage from Samsungs investment.

BGL in response to your points, Yes I did also have a problem finding a variety of different boards for different form factors in the AM3+ area and a lot of the existing boards that are recommended are still a few years old.

Whilst I have been an Asus fan for a while due to reliability, I have seen some new boards offered by MSI and Asrock, but having never used products from either of these two companies I am uncertain about whether to purchase one of their offerings. Although I will say MSI and Asrock boast a few feature AM3+ boards which have networking and audio features targeted at gamers. MSI also has an m-atx AM3+ board, and both companies offer an FM2+ Gamer branded board all these motherboards are reasonably priced for the features.

Asus seems to have a robust line of AM3+ boards but outside of their ROG board which is perhaps the most expensive of their products and targeted at gamers their other boards just seem fairly standard certainly not boasting some of the 'gamer targeted features' that other brands claim to have.

In response however to the Game FM2+ Motherboards offered by Gigabyte (Sniper), Asrock (Fatality), and MSI (Gamer) which are all affordable gamer oriented motherboards.

Asus did release 2 competitors in the FM2+ socket one of which is the the Asus Crossblade Ranger (a ROG) board, and the other which I suspect North America is less familiar with is the Asus A88X Gamer Motherboard, http://www.kitguru.net/components/motherboard/leo-waldock/asus-a88x-gamer-motherboard-review/

The price of the A88X gamer board (in regions where it is available) comes in at around $50 less than the Crossblade Ranger.

All rambles aside it seems mobo manufacturers have certainly stepped up their efforts to offer enthusiasts FM2+ options which boast the latest features or certainly more modern features than some of the AM3+ alternatives.

Also better IPC performance on a quadcore cpu for gaming purposes only is probably advantageous over more cores unless someone is doing stuff like video editing or streaming where hex core or octa-core cpu's do have clear benefits.

I tend to be an all purpose user and do some programming, gaming, video editing etc and so for me the FX6300 is looking like the sweet spot right now, but I cant help but feel that with emphasis being put on FM2+ chipsets by manufacturers there is a great deal of untapped potential here.

If we were to speculate on future happenings in AMD, and lets assume the best possible outcomes say Samsung does acquire and invest a great deal into AMD and spends a bulk of that on engineering and also upgrades the manufacturing to FinFET standards then next year we may see some balancing between AMD and Intel as far as market share, to be honest though most AMD Cpu's do hold their own against their Intel counterparts even if AMD lacks hyper-threading.

And while I wont champion a Kaveri APU (unless you truly cannot afford a dedicated GPU which will smoke the APU in performance), I do see a future for Athlon on the FM2+ Socket and would love to see a high grade product from AMD over the next year that fully unleashes the capability of steamroller.

I will try and pick out some parts on Newegg and Amazon and make a list of the two builds I am looking at for both the 860k and FX6300.

I would say either will do what you want. I can't speak for the 6300 because I never owned it. I bought the 860k this year and enjoy it. I paired it with 16gigs of 2133 gskill ram and a Asus R7-260x. I can play all the games I want. I play BF4, Thief, Lichdom Battlemage, Landmark, Everquest and Tomb Raider. Photoshop and Maya work well also. I upgraded from a core 2 duo 6400 and ATI 9600xt. Disclaimer some games I have to run on medium settings. e.g. BF4. I get really good frame rate. I say if I got a r9-290x i could play it on ultra but that is just me.

As for the future of a company goes; no one knows for sure. I heard that none of the new FX chips will be on either AM3 or FM2. They will most likely release another FM2 chip but that will probably be it for the socket. No new chips will be released with the AM3+ Socket. (This is my Opinion) The new FX chips will be released on a FM3 socket and support DDR4. This will all happen in 2016 so you have a whole year to wait and see. AMD will be releasing their new 300 series GPUs sometime real soon. I would hold out on buying a new Graphics card until then. The price will be cheaper on the 290x.

Hope all this info helps.

*Edit
Oh i forgot i did not overlock my chip. I am still using an old hyper 212 and My HWmonitor is showing it max out at around 72c when playing games. but it shows the max around 32c on another cpu temp. Not sure exactly how how my cpu is getting and afraid to push it. I ran it at 4.2 without hitting any voltage but only ran it about a week. Stress tested fine at that bump. I used amd overdrive stress test for a full day and it passed.

@jonnytombstone My 860k is paired with a Hyper 212 as well, clockspeeds are set at 4 GHz normal and 4.4GHz turbo, no voltage adjustment was necessary and it works really well. Currently it is partnered with an R9 290, but I also have a GTX 770. It works well with either card and BF4 with ultra settings is quite playable - but it is unable to push the graphics cards to their full potential.

@gameg33k I wouldn't worry about what might come from AMD next, just what your requirements and budget are right now. If you need to upgrade now, you need to upgrade now, only if you can muddle along for another 6 months is waiting an option. Waiting for 2016 is in my opinion too long if you can't actually do what you need to do on your current machine.

In terms of motherboards I am currently using products from MSI, Gigabyte and ASUS. They all work as required. I prefer the simplicity of the Gigabyte BIOS/UEFI the most, and MSI's convoluted setup the least. I can however access the MSI BIOS from windows and flash it from USB without a CPU installed.

Yeah I was thinking about waiting until 2016 but I decided against it. I bought the 860k so when I upgrade next year I will use this system as a media center and cut the Cable cord =).

I have actually fallen in love with the fm2 AMD. Yea I may never push a 290 to the limits but I wouldn't notice it until I had a i5 or FX Computer side by side =)