AMD - Piledriver chitchat

[teppic]

I guess it's a reference to the low cost and that they include a decent GPU. But an FX-6300 plus an HD 7750 would be leagues ahead for not much more than an A10-6800K.

[badass]

The average forumite is the average sun reader. Sense will never prevail. Getting would up by them spouting crap only serves to shorten your life expectancy.

[martober]

Trinity is good at what it does, and the GPU is the main thing that makes it appealing in my view. It's often a better option than the i3s it's positioned against for a system without a dedicated GPU, and it's good for a budget laptop (wish there were a few more available though). 8 core FX chips are competing with i5s, and generally don't compare very well.

[teppic]

The average forumite is the average sun reader. Sense will never prevail. Getting would up by them spouting crap only serves to shorten your life expectancy.

Yeah, I rarely let these things annoy me, but when you're the only person not just talking nonsense and then get snide comments after posting suggestions backed up with actual knowledge/experience, it can be hard not to get wound up

[badass]

You like Trinity, yet the FX series which is the trinity CPU with L3 cache, more threads and hence faster you are not impressed with? That isn't consistent.

Yes it is. They also have more expensive motherboards, use more power, have no built in GFX and those extra threads are far less useful than the first 4 threads you get with a quad core Trinity/Richland CPU.
AMD's cores are well behind Intel's, however their GFX is well ahead of Intel's. With no GFX to impress, why would someone impressed by Trinity be impressed by FX series CPU's?

The FX series may be just as impressive to you, but that doesn't make anyone who disagrees inconsistent.

[watercooled]

@badass: Very true. It took me a while, but I've learned you can't correct everything you see on the net and to just avoid certain websites/forums. TBH I'm currently using custom adblock filters to block comment sections on certain websites.

@martober: It depends what you're comparing, FX chips often perform very competitively, especially in well-threaded apps. Not so much in some certain synthetic benchmarks heavily influenced by, and optimised for, Intel, of course. Unfortunately these benchmarks are given way too much weight by some reviewers, and bear little resemblance to real-world performance.

Edit: Missed a few comments there.

@badass again: I partly disagree about the extra FX threads not being as useful; many taxing applications and most new game engines scale well to more than four cores.

[teppic]

Trinity is good at what it does, and the GPU is the main thing that makes it appealing in my view. It's often a better option than the i3s it's positioned against for a system without a dedicated GPU, and it's good for a budget laptop (wish there were a few more available though). 8 core FX chips are competing with i5s, and generally don't compare very well.

An 8320 is £114 at Aria currently, that positions it with the higher end i3 CPUs in price. If you take a look at gaming benchmarks for typical shooters, and find any where it compares badly to similar priced Intel CPUs, post the links.

[DanceswithUnix]

Yes it is. They also have more expensive motherboards, use more power, have no built in GFX and those extra threads are far less useful than the first 4 threads you get with a quad core Trinity/Richland CPU.
AMD's cores are well behind Intel's, however their GFX is well ahead of Intel's. With no GFX to impress, why would someone impressed by Trinity be impressed by FX series CPU's?

The FX series may be just as impressive to you, but that doesn't make anyone who disagrees inconsistent.

Those first four threads are faster on FX thanks to the L3 cache, and no-one talking about gaming prowess of a CPU will be using integrated graphics, so whilst just the job for my 8 year old offspring the high end it is irrelevant wasted silicon.

[martober]

An 8320 is £114 at Aria currently, that positions it with the higher end i3 CPUs in price. If you take a look at gaming benchmarks for typical shooters, and find any where it compares badly to similar priced Intel CPUs, post the links.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu...0_6.html#sect0 shows a 55w i3 3240 (seems to be £95-£100) beating the 8320 in some games, matching it in others. The 8320 isn't a terrible cpu, and it's certainly priced much more competetively than the 8350 but I still don't like to recommend it due to the much greater power requirements.

[badass]

Yes it is. They also have more expensive motherboards, use more power, have no built in GFX and those extra threads are far less useful than the first 4 threads you get with a quad core Trinity/Richland CPU.
AMD's cores are well behind Intel's, however their GFX is well ahead of Intel's. With no GFX to impress, why would someone impressed by Trinity be impressed by FX series CPU's?
The FX series may be just as impressive to you, but that doesn't make anyone who disagrees inconsistent.

@badass again: I partly disagree about the extra FX threads not being as useful; many taxing applications and most new game engines scale well to more than four cores.

Those first four threads are faster on FX thanks to the L3 cache, and no-one talking about gaming prowess of a CPU will be using integrated graphics, so whilst just the job for my 8 year old offspring the high end it is irrelevant wasted silicon.

I guess I need to be a little clearer. Whether or not you find one, the other or both impressive is personal. Whatever your opinion, as long as it is based on sound reasoning, it is not wrong.
DanceswithUnix and watercooled on OTOH see a use for the FX series and are impressed. No one is wrong in that case but Danceswithunix is wrong for calling martober inconsistent because they are not impressed with the FX series.
I agree with martober on this one as for our intended usage the APU's make sense. I don't think much of the FX series at all. If CPU performance was that important to me then I'd go the whole hog and get a faster, more expensive intel processor. In fact, for one of my computers I did. The other one is also a mATX cube but it'll be sitting near/under the telly and used for casual gaming at its most stressed. Thus, I like AMD's APU's, but I don't think much of the FX series. In my view they are a niche processor for someone with a very specific use and budget. The APU's have good enough CPU performance and the FX series is for people that want a bit more than good enough but can't/won't spend an extra £50-£100 for a faster, cooler system with a Core i5 or better CPU in it.

[teppic]

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu...0_6.html#sect0 shows a 55w i3 3240 (seems to be £95-£100) beating the 8320 in some games, matching it in others. The 8320 isn't a terrible cpu, and it's certainly priced much more competetively than the 8350 but I still don't like to recommend it due to the much greater power requirements.

I'm not suggesting that it can't be beaten in benchmarks, I'm asking for where it compares badly. In the FPS type games there it's doing very well against any Intel CPU. In Arkham City for instance it's beaten by a 3470 by only 2fps, but a mild overclock would more than make up for that (and since we're over 60fps anyway, it's not relevant to most people).

As I said above, the power requirements are not large, especially at stock. Much less than the graphics card.

[martober]

I agree it doesn't do badly, but the i3 also doesn't do badly, is cheaper and uses less than half the power.

[teppic]

The i3 is slightly cheaper, doesn't overclock at all, and generally performs worse than the 8320, and with newer games taking advantage of more cores, this difference will get bigger. The i3 doesn't do badly, no. Nobody could argue one processor beating another by 1-2fps in any test shows the other to be poor.

The i3 uses maybe 50W less when gaming, under 10W less when not under load. A GTX 580 uses >300W.

[watercooled]

The 6300 is also a decent gaming chip, cheaper than any i3 apart from the 2100 which is currently about a pound cheaper on Scan. Where the i3 wins, it tends to be on poorly threaded games where the CPU is rarely a realistic bottleneck anyway, but in some newer games with well-threaded engines, the dual-cores like the i3 start losing out badly vs 4+ core CPUs.

When does it use less than half the power? Under full multithreaded load? If an application is capable of using all 6/8 cores it's probably going to be performing a *heck* of a lot better than the dual core i3, so that's a completely unfair comparison.

Comparing like-for-like i.e. in gaming, the difference will be far less (when also taking performance into account for well-threaded games, of course).

This whole power consumption thing tends to be blown way out of proportion and echoed around. A lot of the comparisons are comparing an iSomething on a cherry-picked efficient uATX board, while the FX is tested on the uber-rampage-machinegun board they've had lying around in the lab for years. Again, not a fair comparison. The motherboard is frequently responsible for more power consumption than an idle CPU on modern systems.

People tend to not have a stress testing program running 24/7 on their system, so the 'it will be far cheaper to run over time' isn't necessarily that straightforward either. As for idle, it depends more on other components like motherboard and PSU nowadays TBH.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu...0_6.html#sect0 shows a 55w i3 3240 (seems to be £95-£100) beating the 8320 in some games, matching it in others. The 8320 isn't a terrible cpu, and it's certainly priced much more competetively than the 8350 but I still don't like to recommend it due to the much greater power requirements.

That is with a Core i3 3240 which costs £100+ as opposed to the FX6300 which costs around £90.

Moreover,look at the games where the FX6300 wins - the margin is far greater than where the Core i3 wins. I had the Core i3 2100,which is not far off the Core i3 3240 in performance and my mates FX6300 beat it in many new games by a decent amount.

All the new generation engines,namely Frostibite 2,idTech5,CryEngine3,Frostbite 3 and the upcoming Unreal Engine 4 will scale upto 6 to 8 threads. Hence a Core i3 is not worth it anymore.

Look at Crysis 3:

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/screen...sis-3-pcgh.png

Even a Haswell dual core with HT which runs at 3.6GHZ(the Core i5 4570t) cannot beat the FX6300 and it actually consumes another 20W more than the Core i3 3220.

I played the Crysis 3 MP Alpha and the Core i3 struggled and my Core i5 was noticeably better with the same card. The Core i3 was being pegged at 100% over 4 threads. Even in the main game parts are very CPU intensive and thread very well.

If you look a FX8350 compared to a Core i5 or Core i7 for example:

1.)A GTX680 running Batman



Batman uses upto 4 threads.

2.)An HD7970 IIRC running BF3



BF3 uses upto 8 threads.

3. )Geforce Titan running Crysis 3



Crysis 3 uses upto 8 threads.

At the wall the FX8350 is consuming 22W to 78W more than a Core i7 3770K,and 42W to 84W more than a Core i5 3570K.

Moreover look at the FX8350 and FX6350 figures the Core i3 is not half of any of them with regards to power consumption,and the FX6350 is 42% faster and the FX8350 is 72% faster so the FX8320 will be in between the two CPUs in performance and power consumption.

If you look at the last chart the FX6300 is around a third faster than a Core i3 3220 for around 50% more power consumption or 87W in the worst case scenario when gaming,which like with the FX8350 is Crysis3.

However with a Geforce Titan with all CPUs under Crysis 3 which uses upto 8 threads all the systems consumed under 300W at the wall. So any PSU which can provide around 400W on the 12V lines would be fine,so the 12V line is not loaded more than 75% or thereabouts.

The Shuttle PSU in my system for example can power a six core SB-E CPU and a GTX680 or HD7970 fine for example.

I expect for light threaded games,that power consumption for games will have a higher relative drop(due to a lower percentage of available CPU threads being heavily taxed) when compared to say a Core i5,or probably a Core i3.

Edit!!

Another thing is that the AMD reviews tend to use the Asus Crosshair V which is a good motherboard for overclocking but not the best for power consumption,and due to the less integration of functions on the AM3+ CPUs,chipset can affect power consumption more unlike the Intel CPUs(due to the fact most of the functionality is in the CPU like the FM2 CPUs). So I expect the 970 based midrange boards which is what you would use with the FX6300 to be more efficient anyway.

[teppic]

The power argument doesn't hold up a lot anyway, as if you're concerned about 30W or so you can forget a gaming PC, you should be on integrated graphics. The low powered CPUs are ideal for media systems and servers that might be running relatively idle 24/7.