So recently I got a windfall of about $150 dollars. Go me. With this money I have decided to finally upgrade my i3-2100 to something a bit more, idk, better. I was wondering if anyone knows of any great AMD cpus under $100 (keep in mind, i need a new mobo too if i go AMD) or some fabulous ivy bridge chip that can dominate in this price range (doubt that though).
I have a 650ti sc from evga and like to play on high with at least 50+ fps in most games which i sadly have problems achieving nowadays (damn you i3, damn you to hell.)
a sample of the games i play regularly are:
BF4
BF3
NS2
Most Source engine Games
Arma 3
DayZ Mod
DayZ SA
Rust
and basically any game from the total war series
Any recommendations would be incredibly helpful
P.S. I put this under build a PC, but if any mod wants to move it to CPU feel free, i was torn on where to put this.
For just a little bit more you could get this: http://pcpartpicker.com/part/intel-cpu-bx80637i53330
Otherwise, I'd recommend not upgrading at all - and if you have a motherboard the supports overclocking I'd just wait until you have enough for a k-series part. And I'd highly recommend against switching to AMD as you'd need to buy a new motherboard.
I have a tiny little itx mobo in a full tower case. dont judge, i take hand-me-downs alright. the little thing does not support overclocking, it doesnt even support usb3 so half of the ports on the front of my case are just there for show.....
this was why i was interested in getting a real cheap 4-core amd that would still outperform my current i3 and get some cheap atx board to fill out that case
case if you were wondering: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811147053
I perfectly understand that. Cheap/free stuff is great as long as it works.
Well... with your budget you could probably get an Athlon X4 760k and an FM2+ motherboard.
The Athlon is basically an AMD APU without the iGPU; the CPU performs very similarly to the A10 5800k. Here are some benchmarks: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/675?vs=289
Admittedly, most of those aren't for games, so I'll go look for some game benchmarks as well.
Edit: Generally speaking I would argue it's more of a sidegrade - lower single core performance, but higher multithread performance. If you're playing a lot of games or performing other tasks that will use all 4 threads it might be worthwhile. Still, I think you'd be far better off just saving a little more and picking up an i5.
Sadly, I dont think a 4 core amd will outperform your cpu. Looking at anand tech's bench section youre running neck and neck with an amd 6300(both winning their fair share of tests). Thats a 6 core. I think youre video card is whats keeping you from hitting higher gaming settings personally. Run cpuid and see what speeds youre runing on the cpu while gaming. Its probably not quite maxxed out. Id uograde the video card. The 750 ti SC from evga is right at your budget and I saw gaming performance at almost gtx 760 specs with that card when I used this card in a clients build. I could run unigine valley pretty well on full ultra and full aliasing.
Ive got friends running old am2 dual cores with gtx 770 cards running everything full settings.
hmmmm, might as well look into the 750ti
just got off of a game on bf3 and was running at about 90-97% usage on both cores. is this normal? i have never really monitored my cpu usage before so i have no clue.
Thats probably normal for a dual core usage. The benchmarks ove seen for bf3 on high is in the 50s with a 650 and 30s for ultra. Did you used to get that at some point? If so maybe you need to do some optimizing on your PC.
Really theres a lot of options with some cash that would get things sped up altogether. An SSD if you dont already have one speeds up nearly all processes on the computer and you could get a 256 gb Samsung 840 evo for that money. It comes with drive cloning software.
I guess it comes down to what really is the bottleneck and what itll take to upgrade it. Id clean out the PC, do some registry cleaning, defrag the HDD and see where that gets you. Its free. Of course you may have done that already.
What kind of storage do you have? RAM? Ram useage while playing?
I have done all of that already and get just the fps I want in BF3. In BF4 though and any other newer games, my fps drops down into the 40s and sometimes into those nearly unplayable 30s.
I have a 7200rpm 1TB drive from.... one sec. Seagate.
With 8GB of... One sec again. Patriot Ram (should've just left the case open), running at 1333MHz
I think I'm just going to save my money until I get around like 500 USD and then dump about 300 on a new CPU and mobo, and 200 on a new Graphics Card.
Thank you all for the help. If any mods wish to lock this thread for being "resolved" then please go ahead and do so.