I have a budget of $180 on my CPU for my first PC (gaming + school work mainly). What's the best CPU i can get for that price? I was looking at the AMD phenom II X4 965 black edition, but I know this is a lot under my budget, can I get anything better for $50-$80 more that's worth the extra price?
FX-6300 @ $130
the Piledriver chips outperform the Phenoms, FX-8320 is right around $180 also
http://us.ncix.com/products/?sku=76933&vpn=FD8320FRHKBOX&manufacture=AMD&promoid=1033
fx 8320 for $160 and its the same as the fx 8350 just clocked lower. but you can easily oc it to a 8350 on the stock heat sink.
what school work are you doing? if your doing digital media, cad, computer arts the fx 83XX will be much better than an i5 because the types of programs that you use forall that stuff can use 16+cores.
and the fx 8350 can be found for $185 http://us.ncix.com/products/?sku=76932&vpn=FD8350FRHKBOX&manufacture=AMD&promoid=1033
Id reccommend and 8350, top of the line AMD that for multi threaded workloads is an amazing bang for your buck.
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/fCfn go there it is the intel core i5 3470 at 3.4ghz for 180 but its going to be more upgradable in the future so if you wanted to you could upgrade to say a i7 in the future.
FX-8320 will outperform it and FX-6300 is about even at stock, and non K processors cant overclock
Apart from the 3820, though that only allows up to x43.
Unless you are doing rendering you should get the FX-6300 because most games can not take full advantage of all 8 cores on the 8320/8350, and if you can catch the 2500k on sale you should get that.
The i5 3470 is far better than the FX-8320 and the FX-6300 in gaming.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/698?vs=702
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/699?vs=702
Not if it comes to multithreaded games like Crysis2, BF3, Medal of Honour or Civ5. Then the 8350 is on par with an i7.
also keep in mind when looking at fx cpu's that the 6cores have 3 floating point modulas. and the 8 cores have 4 FPM's. the 8 cores do better clock per clock thant he 6 cores if 4 or more cores are being used.
as as for the i5 3470 the fx 8320 cpu will beat the i5 after a eazy 500mhz oc. and if you can use the cores, the 8 core wipes the floor with the i5's
If you have a microcenter nearby, the 3570k
Which is on par with the i5... you do know that an I5 is not really that far from an i7 in games right?
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_fx_8350_8320_6300_processor_4300_performance_review,10.html
Okay in cysis2, in BF3.. well I couldn't find any benchamrks where they haven't had an GPU bottleneck before an cpu on so there they are pretty much equal. That's 4 games out of how many that's only uses 1-4. Also could you please link benchmarks when talking about performance. Would be nice! :)
2500k / 3570k if you can find it for that price, if not an FX 8350.
For gaming, I would say save the cash and get the 6300 unless the 2500k is under that price point.
This Could be usefull, they have a new line up every month.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-3.html
tomshardware is a piss poor source of information
why do you say that about toms ?
id agree some things on there arent the greatest but not piss poor, they have pretty thorough reviews,
ive seen Fx 8350 & 3570k for around 180 so if you fine either of those get them.
After reading the recomendation from toms(linked it, didnt look at it) I would have to say I dont agree, a 3570 from microcenter is more in line.
But toms isnt a bad site, they have a good community with some pretty inteligent people, here and there.
microcenter has i5 3570ks for 169.99