Ok so about a week ago I lost one of my jobs and it paid every two weeks. The other one that I can't lose because it's for school credit pays monthly because I technically work for the college thus I'm considered a state employee minus the benefits (damn). So this has caused me to reconsider my upgrade path.
At the time when I built this I just needed something for college but wanted a little power for some light gaming as well as possibly upgrade down the road hence 16 gigs of RAM (DDR4 wasn't a thing) and 650w PSU and it has done the job well.
Really just looking to enhance my gaming experience on games I already play (Deus EX HR, Saints Row Series, Postal 2, GTA IV) as well as thinking about playing around with emulators (Dolphin, PCSX2)
Def do the 480 but skip the 8350. You might as well do a 9370 if you really want an FX 8 core as the thing is 4.7 GHZ for the same price as an 8370. I would look at the 4000 series intel chips. If you want to REALLY support AMD, do that cpu but buy 2 480's :D
ummm whats wrong with the 8350......Even after the release of the 9370 ive had several of those chips still hit 4.8 and 4.9 on air (mind you it was a big ass noctua cooler).
With the 8350 I would bare in mind that ZEN is supposedly coming out soon. So if you can hold off and maybe save some more cash you could get a sweet zen one.
Only problem with the 9370 is that the mobo I select msi 970 doesn't support it or the 9590 and don't really need to spend the extra on the 990fx chipset with only one gpu
The problem is that you're paying for something that is going to be irrelevant in under 5 months and being a college student I can see how that would be a pain in the ass. Might as well buy the bigger gain imo. That and even with a 970 chipset you'd be better off with a 6300/50. The 970 VRM's explode, literally, with the 8 cores. You have to be careful on that end.
I'm not really interested in new games though well except Arkham Knight and Mankind but I'm waiting for GOTY and steam sale for those so that'll be awhile year or so by then I'll be finished with college and easily afford to build a much more powerful PC from scratch by that point
also if you are serious about emulators, specifically the dolphin emulator you will want a better single threaded CPU, an i3 destroys the 8 cores because the emulators are so poor at using more then 2 cores. My i5 650 at 3.7ghz beat out my 8320 at 4.6ghz.
Ok now I understand. If I had that cooler and a locked cpu I would want an 8350 and a MB w/8+1 power. But I would check out this:
And you can still buy a killer gpu for 200 to 300 Also I noticed that the 8 core shines on games that use the frostbite engine like BF4 but on other game engines, not so much. Also you will gor from the Pcie3 standard to the Pcie2 standard. I'm assuming you want to OC cause you looking at an 8350 and you have a Noctua cooler. I could be wrong. You do have the option for Carrizo or Godavari cpu's on your current board. Reading articles on the new Zen cpu's will help the itch. I would also check out the FM2+ sections of some of the overclocking forums to see what you can get from that 88 board. I have the same one but without the wi-fi and a 7870 w/ dual gfx. Still haven't even started to see what that platform can do. B4 I typed all that I should have asked weither it's just gaming, gaming+OC'ing or ya just want an FX build:) (which I totally get BTW)
Dolphin runs like ass on AMD stuff due to its single threaded nature in almost every case. Frankly at this point I would recommend buying a Haswell I5 off of eBay and getting a Lga 1150 board on the cheaper side. Skylake is going to be more expensive and also require you buy new ram, which definitely increases cost.
Fuck the 9370, it runs hot as fuck and not worth it compared with a I5 4460 or something similar. The 8350 and lower aren't bad options if your getting a deal on them, but do realize that Dolphin and really any other single threaded program will run like ass on those chips. I used an 8350 as my daily driver for a long time, and it struggled with single threaded applications even though mine was ran at 4.4Ghz or higher 24/7.
