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.