Ok so my father runs a Small Business/Self Proprietor. He has been getting by with his several year old dell XPS laptop, but wants a better computer. He mostly does your basic book keeping & Surfing the web, but also does some CAD work, nothing heavy just basic 2D sheet and small 3D parts that will be cut on a mill. his biggest problem is he multitasks or shall i say never closes anything. and i know the laptop doesnt have enough ram or processing power to keep up with what he does.
iv built a few rigs in the past for my brother and friends all AMD just because of the Price to Performance seems better. the last was my own with a AMD 8350, 32GB Ram & a 7970 very satisfied with the results and dont see a need to upgrade any time in the near future.
He wants a 2 monitor setup that "isnt as slow as this POS he has now" so i figure im probably going to stick with the 8350 8 core, throw in a bunch of ram, SSD boot drive, 1TB HD and just get a sub $150 Graphics card to run the 2 monitors. Iv looked at the R Series cards and a R9 is out of the budget and its probably overkill anyway. and the R7 series seem to be less power hungry but the older series cards still annihilate them in performance and are cheaper ?
I guess im just wondering if their is any up side to a R7 vs a 6970 other then the dollar or two a month you will save on your electric bill ? Like it would even matter when you have a machine shop spinning 8 hours a day.
Do your dad a favor and don't go AMD on this one. The scenario you describe is mostly single-threaded workloads and he'll not benefit from an AMD eight-core in what he does. You also don't need a beefy GPU for this. Any modern GPU will handle office type stuff and some CAD work just fine, even on two screens.
really ? because i had looked at the 4460 before and its $30+ which isnt going to be a deal breaker. but its only better in a (SIngle Core) tests and its not by that much, and falls behind across the board everywhere else, i figured with the larger cache on the 8350 and push button Turbo clocking or a light overclocking if needed, as well as the lesser price it was a sure win ???
i dont mean to be a AMD Fan Boy its just what i have always used, i guess i dont know any better ?
the nearest intel processor overall seemed to be the 4670 and it was another $80+ more and it was about equal across the board not single core operation ?
i guess my biggest question is their any upside to a R7 265 vs a 6970 if im shopping for a sub $150 graphics card, other then the power consumption ?
Well, it's the cheapest i5 available after all, so probably it won't have that big of an advantage over an 8350. But, I don't see the point in investing in an end-of-life product which the FX-series clearly is. The Intel platform is much newer and will also be a lot more power efficient.