Up until a few weeks ago, I thought my AMD Phenom II X6 1055T was a damn good CPU. And it played all my games fairly well. Decent enough for me. But I tried to play the newer Tomb Raider, and I’m barely getting 40 FPS.
I don’t need bleeding edge. I’d rather just have something relatively modern and tried and teste, AMD of course, yet new enough to actually keep me playing some more modern games.
Any suggestions I should upgrade to? Here’s my build:
MSI 970a-G46 Motherboard
AMD Phenom II X6 1055T
16 Gigs of DDR3 PNY Ram
128 Gig Corsair P128 SSD
4 - 1TB seagate HDD As movie, and TV storage
1 - Intel Gigabit, NIC.
XFX AMD RX 470 6Gb Video card
I’d like to stick with the ram I got, and the Motherboard, but if I have to switch them out, I guess I will. But damn DDR4 is so expensive.
Ouch…I mean that thing is slower than the FX-8350 I use to have, and the 8350 is know to be a bottleneck on single-core performance when compared to most more modern CPU’s. With that said though, your system does seem to meet the minimum requirements, if only just barely. I find it hard to believe that you wouldn’t be able to play Tomb Raider at 1080p with some tweaks to the graphics though (most likely, you’ll need to turn down the quality and shadows). What settings are you using? Resolution?
It may be time to put the Phenom on the shelf. Just to put this old warrior into perspective, Cinebench R15 results:
CPU
Score
i5-6200U
265
Phenom 1055t
394
FX-8320
604
Ryzen 1700x
1509
While according to the compatibility list, the FX-8320 should work with your motherboard, it is a space heater and depending on cost probably not worth it.
Depending on how urgent you want to upgrade, either wait for Ryzen 2 benchmarks to leak or start homing in on the Ryzen5 1600 + X370 mainboard.
I mean the 2600 will be faster than the 1600. It can’t be worse.
At this point, it is only a month away, might as well just wait for the new chips.
Not to criticize OP’s build, but that motherboard is one of the worse motherboards out there for AM3+. Serious VRM popping issues. I wouldn’t put an FX CPU in it. Besides it isn’t much of an upgrade anyway
Look at the 6-core R5 1600 Ryzen chip; couple that with a B350 motherboard and a 16GB kit of DDR4. You might see sales soon as Ryzen gen. 2 is set to drop in approx. a month and some change. Ryzen gen. 1 doesn’t OC too far, but the performance seems to be good enough already and you have 12 threads on that. Start saving and pricing those parts is what I’d say.
I don’t think replacing an 125 watt Phenom with a 125 watt or 95 watt FX will set your MB on fire
I would not get an 8350 at retail, but one at 50 bucks might be a nice boost
yes, I’m running Linux, but lately when I’m not using it, I need to leave it on windows. (I dual boot) Wife’s pc died, and mine is the only one around. And the lates wine, does NOT somehow now support the program she has for work. although in Wine 2.0 it worked fine. Wine 3.0 it’s decided to stop working, so I have to have windows on my machine again, cause it’s the only computer in the house.
But the stuttering is new and Only on some games. Older games seem to be generally fine, but some newer games are starting to show this cpu’s age I guess. Was a powerhouse while I had it. Now I think I need a new one though.
Unless you want to downgrade in one way your biggest cost will be RAM.
Anything from the Ryzen stable will be faster, a B350 board with Ryzen 5 1600x would be the sweet spot (keep the rest of the hardware)
But DDR4 RAM required will bite.
I second the suggestion to keep the video card for the time being. It is capable of 1080p gaming at decen frame rate and detail, getting something capable of 1440p or up at this point will be very expensive.
Another (perhaps interim) alternative:
Find a Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, or ideally, Haswell board + CPU.
They will take your DDR3 memory and provide significantly faster performance than what you have. You might be able to get those parts relatively cheaply as an interim until the price of DDR4 comes down (and buy Ryzen 2xxx or the Ryzen 2 CPUs following next year at that point).
Sure, it’s stepping out of the AMD fold, but times are tough memory price wise and sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do…
Not having to buy new RAM will be a massive saving to put away for later.
The way they fucked up with security is a pain in the ass. And they are trying to skate under all the trouble they’re in, and trying to placate the customers with bullshit marketing shit. It’s also needlessly expensive.
AMD seem to seriously keep their products, at least the consumer stuff within the average Joe’s cost. And Intel is just a bunch of greedy fucks that overinflate their prices so that they can claim it’s for businesses.
I kinda have issue with that. Yes, they are greedy, but it’s a business. Every business have a goal to make money.
Here’s the deal though. Intel have a huge issue to solve at the moment and that us their monolithic CPU structure. AMD can manufacturer many small chips and make a few CPUs out of them. Intel can’t. Intel makes large chips. If there is an issue with the chip - the entire large die goes to the bin. So Intel chips are inherently more expensive. AMD were smart and made way cheaper to manufacture design, my guess is out of necessity… So Intel don’t really have a lot of room to balance pricing, before they hit one of two walls - being way too expensive with AMD as proper alternative, or not being able to cover their expenses, because of the design they are using.
It was fine in dual core and quad core era, but now many people are looking at affordable 6 and even 8 cores. Intel will never be able to make cheaper processors than AMD while using the monolithic design.
But if you want to improve performance, your choices are Ryzen (which needs DDR4) or you go with something that is faster than your old box from the intel stable that can make use of your DDR3 (and then upgrade to a newer AMD platform when DDR4 is less ridiculously priced).
AMD didn’t make anything faster really that was DDR3 capable, unfortunately. Well, there was bulldozer, but it’s not as much of an upgrade as i’d personally be happy with to be honest.
Oof.
Yeah, probably best to step up to a ryzen 5 or ryzen 7.
Or you can go used and go Haswell / Haswell-E (Don’t pick up a Rev1 MSI X99-SLI-PLUS motherboard, been having problems with that board for awhile now. too expensive to go buy something else to turn that into a second machine right now.)
