My wife has a 8320 it does fine playing games you should enjoy the rig a lot. When actually playing games the paper difference between Intel and amd isn't that bad.
The 260x is a little weak but only having to buy a video card isn't bad at all
That's a good motherboard, the best one I've used for the AMD FX. And yah, you probably won't do much overclocking with that kind of cooling, the FX runs hot if you want it stable. Especially if you want to run some heavy AVX load.
My recommendation would be to turn off Turbo and then carefully up the Vcore for stable ~Turbo frequencies. I've found on several motherboards that the Turbo function is no good, it over-volts the CPU too much for that frequency. The motherboard VRM runs hot and on weaker motherboards than the Sabertooth, they will throttle (or die). If you are going to overclock remember that the motherboard components need airflow, the VRM and the NorthBridge run hot on 990FX motherboards when you overclock. The Sabertooth I ran had both the VRM and NorthBridge watercooled. That really helped for overclocking. There is a good guide for overclocking over at overclock.net for Asus motherboards in the AMD CPU section.
I had the best results with FSB overclocking, at around 300 MHz FSB and a nice RAM OC it was very snappy at some things. Still couldn't handle serious gaming loads though. It was almost funny when I switched to an Intel i7 4930K, for example would my heavily modded Skyrim load much faster on the FX, but then run notably worse than the Intel. The FX can decompress files like there is no tomorrow, and then have (comparably) bad perf at other typical desktop loads. It's a server CPU for sure.
Thanks for the advice. I will come back to your comment if I feel to get started on OCing the cpu. Turning off Turbo seems like a good idea for a start. I'm not really concerned about not being able to do what I want with that cpu. I can't really see any problems with my or my girlfriends gaming loads. Our demands are for sure not that high, she is fine with 20 - 30 fps (on low presettings) ^^ in the games she adores for the story. I for myself am more into really low demanding indy-games, some older titles. Not on a hunt for recent AAA ultra. Currently on an I7-3630QM and K3000M laptop, doing some Array-multiplications using my fortran code for my Bachelor. I am fine with the performance, and mostly getting this rig to not have to carry the laptop over to the TV if we want some movies. But getting input of what's doable is always nice.
Since I mentioned giving a follow up: Here it is.
Got the system on friday, spent 2 hours on redoing the sloppy cable managment, set up Mint (had to fill up the ssd with zeros since the UEFI-installer recognized a MBR partition even after I removed the partition table with parted and refused to install over it).
Set up Steam and tested Borderlands 2 since it's the only more demanding game I got in my library which also supports Linux natively. After Half an hour gameplay I looked up the temperatures with lm-senors and had the processor running at 38°C at 21°C room temperature. Will test Factorio sometime soon since it's more cpu bound, but I'm confident it will be fine.
I don't regret buying the system at all, does everything as expected.
Thank's for all the advice and support guys.
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Great to hear that you are enjoying your new Linux box so much. Keep us posted, and I'd enjoying hearing about how it handles Factorio, congrats!
- AK
If you'd like me to test out one of your savegames to give a comparison, I'll happily run it. I have to admit due to my lack of time I'm not really far into the game, my biggest factory so far has not even reached 5K of iron plates in a minute. I would have to start a new game since I did not back them up when doing a fresh install of my dual boot laptop and I'm a really slow builder.
So that's that. Cheers for the Factorio excitement
I actually haven't ever played Factorio, just been told what it's about, and have been curious what sort of PCs are able to run it. I can be patient though haha, hope you continue to enjoy the new box!
- AK