Athlon X2 5200+ 45nm 2.3GHz AM3 unlocks to Phenom FX-5200

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

With Zen out at the end of the year and AM4 coming out in the next few months,I would try and hold off for a while TBH!!

[Uriel]

It's only really instability, rather than performance that's really making me think about an upgrade soon. I don't have the time I once did to tweak and troubleshoot a system. And the odd (they are only occasional) crash in games wouldn't matter much - it's the peculiar boot problem afterwards that bothers me.

I do have a spare, unused hard drive the same size as my SSD lying around though. I'm tempted to clone my boot SSD to the spare HD as a failsafe contingency and then try a clean install of Win 10 on the SSD.

If I were to upgrade now, I think I'd be looking at LGA1151. Perhaps an i3 6100T immediately, with a view to migrating to an i5 late in the socket's life. The FM2+ CPU's aren't really far ahead enough of what I have already. I'd rather hold on for longer though. I suspect the FX-5200 will 'do' for most cross platform games this console generation.

But yeah - the AM3 Athlon X2 5200+ was more like paying for a pentium and getting a higher end i5. I don't think we'll see that again.

[watercooled]

I've also noticed instability on Win10 vs 7 - I had very few stability problems on the release version of 7 (I did have some BSODs on the release candidate, but they stopped with the stable version), but already on Win10, after less than a month, I've had multiple hangs, non-BSOD reboots and game/application crashes.

Based on that, and a fairly significant number of Win7>10 upgraded systems I've seen from friends/family, I'm personally of the opinion that Win10 is just plain less stable than 7 on existing hardware, even nearly a year past full release. I'm can't be sure how much of this is purely down to Win10 itself, and how much is down to it being an upgrade rather than a clean install, but while MS seem to have done a fairly good job of making the upgrade process fairly straightforward, the same can't necessarily be said of things like driver qualification. E.g. I've also seen a couple of laptops constantly dropping WiFi connections on Win10, and immediately fixed back on Win7.

I'm with scaryjim on trying a clean install first though before forking out for new hardware.

WRT LGA1151, I'd nearly always pick a non-T processor over a T one unless you're severely power-limited e.g. PicoPSU. A couple of reviews have shown that they're really not more efficient at all - they have lower maximum power, but correspondingly lower performance so it just balances out. Idle power will be essentially identical because of gating. They're basically just standard models with a lower power limit. And TBH on most desktop workloads you'll likely have a hard time approaching the T version TDP on even the standard dual core versions anyway.

In addition, there's not a huge price difference between i3 and i5, if you have a view to upgrading to an i5 you're probably better just getting one to start with - Intel's platforms tend not to have much future upgrade potential as for quite some time now we've had a new, incompatible platform with every 'tock', though it's possible we'll get more than two on 1151 depending on what Intel do with Kaby Lake and Cannonlake as they're not following the tick-tock model now.

[Uriel]

Well - Everybody's Gone To The Rapture runs quite acceptably on medium settings at 1920x1200 (With FX5200, GTX 660 Ti 2GB, 8GB RAM). It's still a very pretty game indeed on medium settings.

[Uriel]

After playing a bit more Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, I realised I was getting those game freezes just as new sounds or audio files appear. Sometimes it would freeze when new textures were loading in too. Plus if I left them long enough, it turns out that the PC would spring back to life and it wasn't actually game over crash wise. That made me think a possible software conflict could be causing the freezes. After googling the symptoms I began to think 'antivirus'.

So I did a bit of experimenting. AVG had been installed on Win7 through the upgrade to Win10. So I did a bit of an experiment with that, Microsoft's own AV and the free trial of Bitdefender (which has a gaming mode for minimal interruption with full screen apps).

Basically Bitdefender seems to allow the game to run glitch free (based on around an hour's play) where as the other two have audio glitches and the occasional overly long freeze. I'm keen to go back and try some of the other games that were giving me problems now and see if they were similarly affected.

It looks like something was off with the AVG installation too. It didn't uninstall using the standard Windows tool and I ended up using a removal tool from their website.

[Uriel]

Been going nearly 6 years now. Now paired with a GTX 970

The freezing issues I had seem to have stopped (I suspect legacy drivers from the Win7 to Win 10 upgrade that I eventually tracked down and squished). The audio problems turned out to be a faulty optical cable.

I recently did a little experiment, pushing my RAM voltage on my GA-870A-UD3 up another 0.1v. That's been enough to push the bus up to 302 (so 3.47GHz for the CPU). The chip was still barely over stock volts in a benchmark I ran at 3.4GHz. That leads me to believe that the speed could be pushed significantly higher with higher voltage DDR3.

Not keeping my existing RAM at higher voltage though so I'll keep with the 3.3GHz 24/7.

I'm keeping an eye out for a suitable upgrade (if Ryzen SR3 chips have a chance of unlocking that could tempt me) but overall it's not urgent. Games still play to my satisfaction (although I'm fairly tolerant of framerates - if it can stay above 30fps I'm usually happy. Surprisingly the Doom demo was absolutely fine despite their recommendation of an FX8320 as the minimum AMD CPU.

[Uriel]

Coming up for this thread's 6th aniversary tomorrow.

Just posted this on another forum. Thougt it might be of interest here too:

Being as it's the 6th anniversary of this thread starting, and I'm feeling a bit gung ho with all the kaby lake and ryzen talk, I decided to see if I could squeeze a bit more out of it.



Got past my 287 bus limit by dropping TRFC timings from the SPD rated 110ns to 160ns and setting the core and CPU nb voltages to stock for a Phenom II 980.

Didn't really do any stability testing to speak of. Just pushed up the bus in small increments and ran some benchmarks every 100mhz. Maybe one or two signs of flakiness upwards of 3.6GHz. Last successful set of benchmarks at 3.7GHz. Took the CPU-Z shot just before it BSODed on me running Fritz.

Maybe there's life in the old dog yet - but I don't really have time for a proper OCing and stability testing session at the moment.

[scaryjim]

Coming up for this thread's 6th aniversary tomorrow. ...

So your CPU has cost you £5 a year over the last 6 years? Doubt many people on Hexus can say that

[Uriel]

I suppose so. I already had my cooler, so can't say that added to the price. Blew a mosfet on that Jetway HA08Combo board when I switched from DDR2 to DDR3 but Jetway allowed an RMA even though they knew I'd been overclocking. So yes - pretty cheap even with the collateral damage.

I added an £8 heatsink to the PWM section on my Gigabyte 870A-UD3 board before pushing the CPU up to 3.8GHz but again, it's just a spare I had lying around.

Only CPUs I can see with similar value at the moment are 2nd hand LGA 1366 and 2011 Xeons - but motherboard prices are sky high on those so I don't think that's going to be an upgrade path for me. I occasionally see Phenom II 960Ts going for £30 and wonder if I could get a hex core on the cheap with another unlock but the benefits of that would be limited given the time it would involve (and the limited benefits of older and current AMD CPUs in general, even if overclocked).

Anyway - it would appear I may have essentially got a Phenom II x4 980 (an £150 CPU at launch) in disguise, 3 months before it launched, for about £30. That's not bad really.

[Uriel]

Coming up for 7th anniversary soon. Still going strong (mainly). Stayed at 3.3 Ghz for daily use though, despite a few adventures around 3.8GHz.

One or two signs of this rig's days being numbered - maybe. Over the summer I got a few overheating related crashes or freezes (not BSODs, just lockups). It wasn't CPU core temperature, or anything I could monitor - just something that happened when the weather was warm while gaming. The Windows 10 creators' update (via Windows Update Assistant) broke a few things (like most steam games) so I've had to revert back to keep them working. I'd like a few creators' update features though (like the Dolby Studio stuff).

I tried upping the RAM to 16GB but found that the Crucial sticks I bought just wouldn't take similar a similar bus speed to my existing RAM at similar settings. So without a lot of experimentation I'm stuck with the RAM I've got. DDR3 is only available in lower voltages these days. I'm told the AM3 platform would overclock more comfortably with fewer sticks of higher voltage RAM. If I want more RAM it will probably mean saying goodbye to the CPU (given games are more heavily threaded now, it might be tempting just to throw a 2nd hand Phenom II x6 black edition and the extra RAM at it).

However, a career change means I'm back to being a full time student for two years (very full on and busy) and we've recently had another child so financial means are reduced and time is constrained. So once a few deadlines are out of the way I may just go for a clean install of W10, give the PC's insides a once-over with an air-duster and hope to keep it going for the indefinite future.

Gaming wise I don't have much time to play, but it's getting regular use from my oldest two sons with the Lego franchise and its local co-op games. It's still my main rig for working purposes though. A quick browse on Userbenchmark suggests that its gaming performance is roughly on par with a celeron G3950 (issues with 4 threads vs 2 notwithstanding) so in today's money I'd still need to spend £50ish on a CPU to beat it. Guess we're on about £4.30 per year of use for this CPU now - and who knows how long it will go on?

[Zak33]

love this thread...it's like an old mate coming round for a beer

[Uriel]

The other thing, which means I'm in no hurry to upgrade CPU is that, at 1080p and full settings in the latest games, the Phenom FX5200 and GTX 970 are remarkably well balanced.

The game test pages at gamegpu.com usually have a CPU table at the end that let you sort CPUs by graphics card. Assuming I'm performing somewhere around a quad core piledriver -FX-4300 stock or thereabouts (which bears out according to this thread http://www.overclock.net/t/1502266/l...686/id/2100100 and userbenchmark has me at 44% for gaming), in the majority of new games I am GPU limited at 1080p, or it's so close that a platform upgrade would make negligible improvement to minimum framerates, without also upgrading the GPU.

[Uriel]

Couldn't take the heat this week. Had to back down to 3.2 GHz for stability. Not quite sure what's heat sensitive mind, I suspect the motherboard might be starting to feel the strain after all these years.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Couldn't take the heat this week. Had to back down to 3.2 GHz for stability. Not quite sure what's heat sensitive mind, I suspect the motherboard might be starting to feel the strain after all these years.

Ryzen good value for money? Bah,your CPU makes it look positively Intel HEDT like in price!!

[Uriel]

Ryzen good value for money? Bah,your CPU makes it look positively Intel HEDT like in price!!

I'm a bit skint just now (gave up the previous job and at college training to be a vicar) so a new rig isn't really on the cards. I do have an Athlon II 640 that I bought very cheaply lying around that supposedly (according to the person I bought it from) unlocks to a Phenom II x6. Haven't had time to try it yet. Assuming it's OK the higher multiplier might buy me some time, allowing the motherboard to run at a lower bus speed.

[peterb]

Love these long running threads - thank you for the updates - just had a look at the first photo where it all began!

(And quite a career change - hope all goes well for you)