I replied to CGI with what I would reply with here as well.

I have used over a dozen CPUs to game and benchmark in the last 5 years or so, and I see people using "Don't buy AMD" as fear mongering like their PC will run out of juice in a few years or something. The fact that multithreaded applications in gaming are only now taking off, AMD 6 and 8 core CPUs are not anywhere close to being outdated. Even 4 core Phenoms have plenty of life left. 

Sure Starcraft 2 will never run good on AMD cpus since its a dual core application but something like Battlefield 3 uses 6 cores maximum and even with SLI 680s, AMD and Intel CPUs behave identical hence the CPU isn't the bottleneck. I'd be willing to bet that most future gaming titles will be more like Battlefield 3 and less like Starcraft 2. 

So you should probably know that Rome II is slightly broken at the moment, so there is a chance that you can't play it even with a Titan or something. I have a 670 and I am not getting 60fps in gameplay on Ultra 1080p. I will just go and try extreme, but I don't think it will look good

The 670 cost me £350 a year ago, so that alone will probably cost you just under $400

EDIT: I ran the benchmarker. 45 fps average on Ultra, 32 fps on Extreme

That's just not true.  i3 will not offer better gaming performance than a FX6300 on modern games and yet they cost the same.  Sub 100 dollars its not even close.

Toms hardware has been recommending AMD cpus for budget gaming for months now

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-2.html

Add to that the fact that you can overclock AMD cpus and get 15-20% more performance and he fact that AMD motherboards usually cost less or come with more features and you got yourself a cheaper platform offering more features and better performance. 

If Intel wasn't being such a prick and would allow overclocking on their i3s they would make a compelling case due to the fact they use less power. But they don't while most people can overclock a FX6300 to 4.8-5 Ghz to match a stock 3570k in terms of performance.

Also, his budget is $500 for the "whole cpu" which to me means the whole PC. I'd love to be in a competition where you and I can spend 500 bucks on a PC, you on Intel based one and me on an AMD one and see which one has better gaming performance.

You know what I will just jump in and try to end this debate right now with these two facts I think we can all agree on:

-Many people act like all of Intel's CPU's are crazy overpriced.   This is not true.  $120 for an i3 is fine, and $50 for a 2.9GHz Celeron is a steal!

-Many people act like AMD CPU's are crazy weak POS.  This is insanely not true.  Some AMD CPU's beat some intel and vice versa.  It depends on which ones we are talking about.

Overall just make sure you buy at least a quadcore or higher.  PEACE!

Well right now it is the hidden Gem of CPU's IMO.  The i3-2120 was about 2 years ago but here check this out:

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://i.imgur.com/0nIkCAb.jpg&imgrefurl=http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t%3D2302954&h=812&w=636&sz=116&tbnid=rPYfWpoXHeA1WM:&tbnh=90&tbnw=70&zoom=1&usg=__qWZNdf9Cn-yaWcPrndpln0c6IZ8=&docid=RmElDeQjqJ0u0M&sa=X&ei=xTcyUqKoM8Tm2QWpsYHQBw&ved=0CDIQ9QEwAQ&dur=325

FX 6300 is a great value right now for sure. i see tigerdirect PC bundles with components that include the FX6300 under 300 bucks...too bad the PSU is always shit. :)

The thing is, I would have no issues putting an FX 6300 in to a high end gaming rig with a GTX 770 or 7970. Overclocking the snot out of it would pretty much give you 3570k/4670k levels of performance and it would ensure minimum frame rate is the same as intels high end CPUs.

I actually think its a better investment than the FX 8350 (bot not 8320). Both FX 6300 and FX 8350 run on the same Piledriver cores. So theoretically for a game to run better on one vs the other, it would have to be programmed to utilize 8 cores. I am not sure a game exists that uses 8 cores. I know Battlefield 3 and 4 utilize 6 cores...but thats about it.

I appreciate the comment above, but I do want to state that I enjoy debating. So yeah if the topic is repetitive, its most likely cause of that... :)

One final statement I want to make is that Intel only pulled ahead of AMD in terms of gaming performance with Sandy Bridge. With the old i7s, they were trading blows with cheaper Phenoms II X4s and getting beaten by the similarly priced Phenom X6 cpus. Sure they had their 1000 dollar i7 980X, but for gaming the price is a non starter. But after Sandy Bridge it was obviously better to go with Intel for high end...

I personally believe that if intel weren't such stingy fucks they could wipe the floor with AMD. They just don't want to set the bar too high but would rather milk every dollar they can out of incremental performance products.

Hi bugrimmar,

I saw your post and wanted to give you some info and options. Full disclosure, I work for AMD. I used to write technical reviews for Rage3D.com.

With a budget of $500 for proc/mobo/mem/graphics you've got a lot of options on the AMD side. I would like to share some options for you:

(1) AMD A10-6800K APU with Gigabyte GA-F2A85XM-HD3 motherboard and a set of 2x4GB DDR3-2133 memory sticks. This will run you around $250, leaving you plenty of cash for games - or other components, I'll add to that in a second.

You asked in your OP about whether APU gaming is any good or not; it is and here's why. The AMD A10-6800K takes four CPU cores and adds a discrete class GPU to it. It's not a high end card, hence why it's named the Radeon HD 8670D. This puts it on par in gaming with an i5 and a GT 630 from the competition - but for a lot less money.

Most games, as was noted in other posts, run 3-4 threads which means they run nicely on quad and six core processors. The next generation of games will be ported from consoles which all run AMD technology. For future proofing, you might consider if you want to wait for some other vendor's hardware to be optimized for the game, or if you want the hardware it was developed and tuned on.

Both AMD and their competitor are in the APU game, one major difference is how much engineering AMD dedicate for graphics, and how good those graphics are. If you're a gamer on a budget, the APU series of products are very strong in both outright performance and in performance per dollar - you get more on both counts.

If you decide to go with the A10-6800K, you can upgrade graphics later to get more performance rather than adding discrete from the beginning, just to get basic performance with an non-AMD product. The APU concept is widely praised - check out Forbes coverage of the A8-6600 to get an idea of what the techology is all about (link - http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2013/08/13/can-amds-newest-apu-play-your-favorite-games-without-a-dedicated-graphics-card-part-1/)

For 1680x1050 you don't need huge graphics horsepower, in fact my next suggestion is way overkill for your needs but I'm an enthusiast, and I like spending other people's imaginary money, so to build the best bang/buck:

(2) FX-6350 3.9Ghz (base, 4.2GHz Turbo) 6-core CPU, Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3 motherboard, 2x4GB DDR3-2133, AMD Radeon HD 7870 GHz ED - This prices out at $505 on newegg, if you take off the rebates then you're at $490; You can get a HD 7950 for only ~$20 more, and that will bump you from the Never Settle Forever Silver tier to Gold, for more free games.

I hope that's helpful and if you need any more questions answered, post 'em up or shoot me a PM. You can find me on twitter as @cavemanjim

My Phenom 2 x6 HTPC is only roughly equivalent to the Core i5 750 in games that don't make use of 6 threads.

Single threaded performance is worse than the later Core 2 processors at the same clock.

However, to the Phenom 2's (And AMD's) credit, the CPU's really switched into another gear when you overclocked the NB to around 3ghz, which increased IPC by around 10-15% in some tasks, the memory controller in the Phenom's were never startling, so the CPU's benefitted greatly from it.

With that said and done, I actually noticed little improvement when moving from AMD to Intel in my primary PC when it came to gaming, I was running 5760x1080 resolution back then, so I was still always GPU limited.
Price/Performance was always in AMD's favor, except for the silly people like myself who shelled out $400+ for a Phenom 2 x6 on launch! :P

Where the real problem lies is with any games that are demanding yet are still single or dual threaded like Sins of a Solar Empire or StarCraft 2, AMD's CPU's just seems to fold, if those kinds of games are important to you, then I would advise to go for even Intel's Core i3.

And if I were to choose any AMD processor however, it would have to be 8320, clocks like a champ, extra 2 cores/1 module for the future.
People laughed at me on gaming forums when I got a Core 2 Quad Q6600 because most games were only single threaded back then, with a few that would use 2 threads, well, fast forward to today and that PC is still used for gaming (Donated it to a friend.), even with games like Battlefield 3, Civilization etc', the Core 2 Duo's would have folded, the extra $50 was well spent for the many extra years of use. (You will upgrade a GPU more often than a CPU in a gaming PC, so keep that in mind!)

Well, since you don't live in the United States, you don't have to worry about the NSA backdoor built right into Windows 8, so I would say go ahead and get it.