After the recent success of my own build a friend as asked me to put together a rig for them to use for gaimg. We have some of the parts already, including an ASUS M5A97 EVO R2.0, Patriot Viper 1866 8Gb RAM (4x2), 7870 OC GPU, a Samsung 840 120Gb SSD, 1Tb WD Black, Antec 300 two, TX650 Corsair PSU.
There is enough money left for one of the two following options for the CPU:
FX-6300 with a Corsair H55 - intend to overclock as much as possible with this set up.
or
FX-8350 with stock cooler - won't overclock this set up.
They work out at about the same price in Australia, and we can't get our hands on an FX-8320 (supplier is out at the moment here).
Which would be the best way to go for gaming? Would the H55 do well? The H60 is just outside of budget range.
Corsair H55/60 are both crappy toys that you'll most certainly regret, none of these is suited for overclocking, as they perform less than mainstream air coolers.
Minimum is Corsair H80 (thick radiator) with performance enhancing mods (higher performance fans and CPU block lapping), and than you'll only be able to get a mild overclock.
The stock cooler by AMD is not bad, but it's the bare minimum for the FX-8350, and I wouldn't recommend it if you live in an area where it gets really hot.
Unless you'll be doing live gameplay streaming or video editing, I'd definitely go for the FX6300 and a nice air cooler like the Scythe Grand Kama Cross Rev.B which is not that expensive but delivers really good cooling performance, also for motherboard components, which is important for AMD CPU's, because they use more power and dissipate more heat, especially when overclocked, and that makes the motherboard run hotter. An FX6300 will never bottleneck an FX 7870, it's avery capable processor, and it will have a longer life expectancy than the FX8350.
In real life and in terms of user experience for gaming and general PC use, there is almost no noticeable speed difference between an FX6300 and an FX8350 or between an AMD or Intel, etc... go figure: different tech shows on the internet are still fighting over which is faster, the FX8350 or the i7-3770k... if the difference were noticeable in normal use, it would be obvious and tech people wouldn't fight over it, because it would be obvious.
So here's the catch - we live in Australia and it can get over 40 degrees celcius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), will the FX-8350 cope? The guy's house isn't air conditioned...
So maybe the FX-6300 with a high performance air cooler would be the way to go? Any recommendations other than the Scythe as our supplier doesn't stock it.
If it really gets that hot over there then I wouldn't chance over clocking with any of these coolers. If you are gonna OC in a really hot environment then I would suggest a custom water build. Stock speeds for an 8350 and a 7870 is more than adequate to run games at high settings anyway. You should look at over clocking your system to squeeze out enough juice because you are lagging in the performance realm. Trust me - there is more than enough umph for your CPU and GPU to handle the latest titles.
Here's something you can do. Ask someone who is a PC gamer in your area if they have any problems running their rig when the weather is hot.
There are many people in SoCal (Southern California) and they see temps of 110F. I'm sure they are not all running with custom water blocks and all that fancy stuff.
i would say the FX8350, with turbo enabled, this asus board does it automaticly, then the cpu runs at 4.2 ghz. stock.
if you want to get same speeds on the FX6300 you need to do overclocking in the first place.
the FX6300 is clocked on 3.5 ghz and it says in tubo modes upto, 4.1ghz, but mostly in practic it will be come maybe to 3.8 ghz with turbo enabled.
so i would just suggest, now its not that hot i guess, so just buy the 8350 with stock cooler, and wenn the weather is getting hotter, till that time you can allways decide to buy a lc cooler unit .
It's my understanding that turbocore only ever really works on a single core when single threaded applications are being used... Am I wrong about this?
as far as i know the turbo core, clocks the core speed higher per core, thats used. or if you gonne use all 8 cores then all 8 cores.
but if you run a single threaded aplication that uses one core, then that particular core, hass more work to do, then the other cores, so then the turbo, overclocks that particular core.
if you run a game that uses 4 threads or 4 cores, then the other 4 cores have less work to do, so then the turbo gonne oc the 4 heavy used cores.
as far as i know it works this way ☻
but im not realy sure what he does with the cores those get less used, maybe he clockes them back. but im not sure about that ☻