Stick with i5-2300 or move to FX 8120

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1

Hi, So I've been running my current system for a while now

  • i5-2300
  • P8P67
  • R9 290 4GB
  • 8GB DDR3

I bought two Kingston HyperX 120GB SSD's too hoping I could put them in RAID0 but the older version of the board I have does not support RAID.

I asked my dad if he wouldn't mind swapping a few things around since he doesn't game anymore. He has a FX 8120 3.1Ghz, 16MB of total cache with a Asus M5A78L-M/USB3 Motherboard.

I can't for the life of me find which combo is better, can the M5A78L-M even do RAID or even have SATA3 ports?

Thanks, Somebody lost the manual and I'm getting a little confused. Running GTA5 I get 20-40fps all on medium and when accessing the cause it seems that my CPU was maxed out, that's why I'm looking for an alternative to the bottleneck.

2

I currently have a 4GHz 2500k and I'm heavily GPU bottlenecked in GTA V with a GTX 760 with some weird custom settings with nearly constant 60FPS at 2160x1080. Given you are running lower settings, at a lower resolution, with a better GPU and getting worse performance, I'd say it's safe to say you're hitting a CPU bottleneck pretty hard, which is odd since you're also well above the minimum PC requirements. The FX 8120 can give a noticeable boost in performance IF you're willing to tinker with it. If not, you'll get roughly the same performance.

Running the FX with only one core per module (disable every other core in BIOS/EUFI, or manually set affinity to every other core), you should see a per-core improvement of about 10-20%. For gaming, this is perfect since the vast majority games don't scale well beyond 4 cores, so the IPC boost would benefit your games more than the extra cores. If you can additionally crank it to about 4.2GHz or higher, that should put you right were Rockstar recommends in terms of CPU performance.

Also, that ASUS motherboard only supports SATA II 3Gbps, but it does have support for RAID 0.

3

I mean if it is your dad, can't you just explain to him the situation and do the testing yourself?

Seems like a more direct approach?

4

What resolution are you running gtaIV at? Although the title is quite the cpu hog a sandy i5 still pulls enough grunt for it. Id be looking at drivers, game configs etc. I cant imagine you'd get more fps with a 8120.
Onboard raid. Most of the time its pretty ordinary. Best bet is to source a 2nd hand RAID card.
If you're after motherboard manuals just head to the manufacturers website and d'load the pdf.

5

Grab the best i7 for your socket for cheap of ebay without changing anything else.

6

GTA5 at 1920x1080

This sounds reasonable, at least until I save enough for a proper build. Any compatibility issues with doing this?

7

Not really. Any LGA 1155 CPU should work. There might be a few things you need to do. Since it's a P67 chipset, you won't have access to the iGPU, so you need a dedicated video card to boot, which you have covered, and you might need a BIOS update to support the newer 3xxx/Ivy Bridge series CPUs, but they will work.

https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P8P67/HelpDesk_CPU/

8

I'd seriously consider grabbing a 3 series i7, 3770k etc.
More or less twice as powerful as the one you have now.