The AMD FX 6300 has 6 cores at 3.5Ghz and is at around £86 ($130); the FX 8350 has 8 cores at 4 Ghz and is £140 ($212). But the i5 3570k has 4 cores at 3.4Ghz and doesn't overclocke as well and is £170.
This can be seen with all AMD cpu's compared to intel.
My question is, why are they so cheap and is there a catch? (e.g. do they run hotter/ not as reliable).
because they are SLOW AS HELL.
hahaha, no seriously, its because intel uses a smaller proces, and they stick all the investment and research costs on the costumer.
BAM sorry couldnt resist.
Intel has a stronger per-core performance. AMD can only operate at high speeds when there is optimisation in the code fore multicore processing.
There single threaded performance isn't as strong (though it is getting better) and they don't support as many instruction sets the last time I checked.
AMD are not cheap - Intel are expensive as hell
AMD has the "best bang for your buck". Even with their low price, I still get great performance in games and just in general. At this point in time, I see no need for me to go Intel. I run on an FX 6300 and I've never had a problem with it, runs great for me when it comes to games.
Dont forget the FX8320 (i got one for £100) i wasent going to upgrade from my FX6100 antill steamroller but £100 was just to tempting.
AMD = corvette with nitrous. intell = ferrari with a high premium
at similar price points they compete. this is because intel has focused their time into shrinking their dye and optimizing for single core applications, AMD has focused on cramming in more cores and increasing speed, which drives up temps and power usage. in the end you get what you pay for.
As for the last part of power usage logan and other videos have proved its not much overtime, but yea AMD is bang for your buck and Intel has always felt crazy expensive.
Even less if you are able to overclock and still use the power saving features. Many people are stuck on this "can't overclock unless power features are disabled" mumbo-jumbo. That is why AMD gets a bad rap for power consumption. Nobody is willing to get a stable overclock then turn back on power saving features to see if they are still stable with them running.
I have my FX-8350 overclocked to 4816 MHz stable on 1.488v and I'm able to leave AMD APM power states, C1E state, and C6 states running stable. My CPU declocks the multiplier down to 7x for 2107 MHz at idle. I can hibernate my PC and it wakes back up from hibernation without any errors.
So all in all, this false information about needing to turn off power save states to achieve an overclock is a load of bull crap. Mostly brought on by people who are thinking in the past where primative power save states were crap and caused the CPU to be seriously unstable even at stock voltages and stock clocks.
Except it's not really, depending on what you're going to use the cpu for. Hyperthreading is, or at least has been, fairly useless for gaming, and seems to have the most (only?) use for encoding video.
Other possible reasons for Intel being so expensive: they almost have a monopoly, they have many deals with pc builders and mostly laptop builders, finding good laptops with AMD cpu's is a hard task in my country at least.
All ultrabooks are Intel (by specification), most DELLs etc are and probably will stay Intel.
If you check out Intels wikipedia entry, you'll see they do a lot of charity work and pay their employees rather well if you can take wiki's word for it.
My question is, why are they so cheap and is there a catch? (e.g. do they run hotter/ not as reliable).
Have you seen unrealiable processors?
Anyway, AMD have different operating temperatures, their maximum is 62 degrees. Intel processors, as far as I know throttle at around 100.
And high operating temperatures are a good thing, actually, cooling systems work more efficiently at high temperatures.
Well, my overclocked FX-8320 with Hyper 212 runs around 30 idle (can't measure) and under 50 degrees at full load.
Basically, AMD have better price/performance ratio for low amd mid-range systems. Intel has nothing to offer under $200, AMD wins every price point there. FX-8320 is a great deal because it costs a little bit more than i3, but FX-8350 is not really a good competitor to i5 in terms of price/performance. And FX-6300 and Phenom II X4 give you enough performance for gaming for very affordable prices which allow you to spend more money on GPU.