| disolitude said: The thing with AMD is that he is likely to run in to bottlenecks with PCIe 2.0, slower memory controller, DDR3 2133 limit (highest stable RAM I can achieve with 2400 mhz sticks), NB bus speed...etc... before he runs in to true CPU bottlenecks where more cores would be beneficial. As a current user for the 8350, I've benchmarked this thing in every possible way I could and honestly the performance is identical for gaming, productivity and pretty much everything else 90% of us do with 4 cores disabled compared to all 8. Only places where I see performance benefits with all cores enabled are rendering, game streaming and synthetic benchamrks... and i doubt he will do any of this. OT - 7870 for 170 is a great deal. But if you see the 7870 XT, PCS+ or whatever ese they call it edition...get that one. Its not a 7870 but a 7950 with a few things disables and a higher clockspeed. It actually beats the 7950 in benchamrks. I've seen it as low as $219. |
PCI-E 2.0 vs 3.0 16x has shown not to cause bottlenecks with gaming, compute scenario's sure, you're looking at a couple of percentage points max though in games.
As for Ram and North-bridge speeds, overclocking the NB clock to around 3ghz can bring about a good 10-15% performance improvement in some lightly threaded games like StarCraft 2, Ram speeds show bugger all improvements, you see bigger improvements with tighter memory timings than higher clock speeds. (Tested on my own FX 8120 and 1090T)
As for the FX 6300 vs 8320, you're right, there is hardly any difference in games today, but that's under the assumption that games will only 2-4 cores for the life of the system.
I remember people recommending Core 2 Duo's over Core 2 Quads when they were first released because games didn't use 4 cores, well. Here we are today and those who bought the Core 2 Quads ended up getting the last laugh as they can usually still run every game you throw at it, especially with the slower chips like the Q6600 overclocked. (That was 6-7 years ago, amazingly long life for a gaming CPU!)
That's compounded by the fact that this next generation of consoles are going to have 8x x86 CPU cores, which should translate into heavier threaded games in the coming years.
I generally always recommend buying the best CPU you can afford at the time, you upgrade that less often than a graphics card that's for sure, unless you're like me who loves shiny new stuff.
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