I don't really like these kind of topics, but I have the option from going from my X4 955 BE to a 1090T very cheap/y right now. As it turns out a 1090T and a 380 can pump out some serious game quality.
My over all upgrade path was going to be to an X6, then an AM3+ board, R9 380, then an 8320 later on, then in another year go to AM4.
Any thoughts?
Also: Yes I know Intel was made from jesus and I could also go to AM3+ and get a 6300 for the same price as a 1090T, but the 1090T works with the board I already have. More convenient.
In my opinion, keep the 955 for now and grab AM4 here in a bit. Unless you can get the 1090T for like 60USD or so, but unlikely as the 1090T is one of those inflated CPUs you see on eBay.
You won't see a huge gaming performance upgrade from the X6, but it will give you some bumps up in general performance.
Is your 955 BE OC'd? Was your plan to OC the PII x6?
Like others have said, for 120 USD hell no. If 60 USD or under then maybe. Depending on whether your 955 BE is OC'd, a non-BE Phenom II X6 would make more sense financially. Moar cores for rendering. Sure the BE's are "better" if you're overclocking but the 1045T's and 1055T's and so on are much cheaper.. And still on average can reach north of 3.6Ghz..
Well, going from 3.2Ghz to 3.6Ghz OC is only 12.5% more frequency. Real world gain is slightly less than that.
Maybe it's better if you just look at the numbers. Sorry for the link spam :D Anandtech doesn't have X4 975 BE (3.6Ghz) test results in their Bench repository so 970 BE (3.5Ghz) and 980 BE (3.7Ghz) will have to do. I don't know how Kdenlive scales with more cores (it'll probably depend on your material and output settings as well..) but Cinebench and Blender is probably a good place to "start" or rather look at those numbers.
^That gives you an idea what you would achieve/lose by upgrading X4 OC > X6 stock.
A stock X6 (say 1055T at 2.8Ghz) will of course fall behind a X4 with higher clockspeeds (say 3.7Ghz) in single threaded workloads but walk past it in multithreaded workloads. Now, imagine in your head an X6 running at 3.6Ghz or higher clockspeed..
The market for Phenom II is... strange. If you can get one (Phenom II x6) for under $100 bucks, I would say it might be worth it, but it's really hard to find one in that price range, at the moment. (Rarely, I should say, lately.) People are getting rid of their Phenom II's all the time, and others are just willing to nab them right up. Also, after getting the Phenom X6, I would not bother with purchasing any further AM3/AM3+ CPU upgrades.
Anyway, I thought about trying to get a hold of a Phenom II x6 to tinker with, but the prices caused by demand are too steep.
You've already talked about overclocking, and that would probably help alleviate any bottleneck you may be having. With an R9 380, it can't be too much of one.
Yeah, they still are relevant. Don't forget that Faildozer managed to regress in IPC over K10 which probably has been regained with the subsequent updates to it, I haven't followed the IPC progress that closely on AMD's side so correct me if I'm wrong.. But anyway, still one of the biggest problems with Bulldozer et al. is the cache latency penalty with the ginormous cache sizes..
But even still, if you look at stock X6 1100T vs FX-8150 or even a FX-8350, there's some workloads the X6 just flies past the FX chips. And in some cases, if you take a closer look, the FX-8350 is faster just because of the sheer brute force that is clockspeed. http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/203?vs=434 http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/203?vs=697 If I have to point to some of those "flies past" numbers: Agisoft Photoscan CPU mapping speed 3D Particle Movement multithreaded FastStone Imageviewer Linux bench OpenSSL sign/verification, Redis memory-key.
And like Calculatron said, if you get a Phenom II X6 now, there's no point whatsoever in doing any other "upgrades" than hopping on to the AM4 + Zen bandwagon later this year, which would be a serious upgrade.
ppl are buying up phenom II X6 because they freaking rock for NAS builds. planning on turning moms X6 build into a NAS shortly. (i should have bought another Phenom II x6 1100T instead of an fx8350) clock for clock the phenom is faster in a lot of applications. if you get a golden chip like mine was and hit 4.1 GHZ then it is faster than an 8350 at 4.8GHZ and thats using all cores at 100%