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AMD question
stizostedion
Member Posts: 23
in Hardware
i have an X6 1100T that will be arriving on friday next week, i am just wondering if i made a mistake in getting that over an i5?...
motherboard included (a gigabyte 990xa-ud3) was quite a bit cheaper on the AMD side of things which freed up some funds for a 120gb SSD. that was the justification.
Comments
If it's for gaming purposes, then yes. If you're running other software that scales well to six cores while still being processor-bound, then no.
Quizzical is definitely the one to ask. I prefer the Intel for almost anything. I have absolutely no basis for it, other than they seem to have worked for me. For some reason, AMD seems like the 'other woman' Somehow something you wouldn't want to touch. I can't explain it myself, I probably bought into the intel hype back in the day and have never recovered.
I self identify as a monkey.
it's general purpose, i only play a bit of elder scrolls iv and soon v, guild wars and hopefully guild wars 2 within the next months
would i even notice the difference on those games between an i3 and the 1100t? lol
Even if you don't need the extra speed of the Core i5 2500K, you could have saved some money and gotten a Phenom II X4. The fifth and sixth cores don't provide any meaningful gaming benefit, and won't in the foreseeable future.
Well, I guess it depends on the price. If you paid $200 for the processor, then it was a mistake. If you paid $120, then it wasn't a mistake, as a Phenom II X4 wouldn't have saved you money, anyway.
As for the motherboard, if you're using a single video card, you could have saved some money by going with a 970 chipset. For multiple video cards, 990X can do it at x8/x8 bandwidth, but 990FX is ideal, as that offers x16/x16 PCI Express bandwidth.
with processors amd v intel, the way I see it, yove got good prices and decent performance v higher proces/faster cpus/*tri & quad channel ram*/evga brand(good support and warranty)
I'd never go amd on my processor, video cards are pretty competetive though.
It really depends. Purely processor, the Intel 2500K is simply unbeatable in any price category by AMD. Platform though, AMD is still quite competent. If you are doing unprocessor intensive stuff like gaming, the processor is not important but often times the platform is. You are going to be paying 2/3rd as much for an AMD platform, and they offer the better top range platform to boot. Too bad you cannot stick an Intel 2500K in a 990FX mobo.
The issue between Intel and AMD is ... delicate.
That 6-core AMD CPU is nice. It probably will benchmark as well as, and perhaps higher than a Core i5 2500k on general benchmarks.
You get 6 real cores. That's better than anything Intel has for the desktop for under $1k.
So if you have software that can use a lot of real cores, your in luck.
Unfortuntely, there isn't much software out there that can really munch on a lot of cores. Games struggle to use more than 2 effectively, a few can go as high as three or four and do something meaningful with them.
Something like video encoding (Handbrake), or rendering (Photoshop), and most benchmarking tools - those can go across cores like no one's business. You'll see great numbers there.
Intel has a couple of key advantages though.
1) Core vs. Core, Intel is faster, so 4 Intel cores are faster than 4 Phenom cores
(but as mentioned above, in things that can actually use 6, your 6 is pretty competitive vs. Intel's 4).
2) Intel TurboBoost is a lot better than AMD Turbo, so Intel can stock boost their chips to higher frequencies (when all the conditions permit).
3) Sandy Bridge has been a great overclocker platform. Thuban isn't bad, but it's not Sandy Bridge when it comes to average overclocking numbers
The X6 isn't a bad chip at all, you could have saved a little bit more and went with the X4 and likely not noticed it much (mostly because so little software out there can use multiple cores effectively), but I think you'll be happy with the X6 too, and the SSD will make a good bit of difference (or at least it does in my experience, I can't stand to use a computer without one anymore).