So i attempted to build a budget gaming PC (At $800).. and came up with:

AMD FX 8320 4.0ghz 8 Core processor

MSI Oc/d NVIDIA GTX 760

G.Skill 8GBs DDR-3 1866mhz RAM

Liquid Cooler for CPU (closed loop)

750W- PSU

Basically, I had looked at all the parts individually, and it seemed good to go, but recently i've heard people shit talking the FX series. I haven't put the machine together yet to test it because im still waiting on some shipping, but have i made a mistake? Is that CPU just underpowered?

Thanks duders

I have the 3.5 GHz 6 core FX processor. Works fine for me, so idk what to say. Intel is probably better, but I haven't had any problems so far. Have fun with your new PC!

It works and it's cheap. It underperforms against pretty much anything intel offers but again it's cheap. You want a budget machine so it's probably your best option.

There are console wars level of idiocy in hardware as well. For videogames and as long as you aren't a graphics whore or MAXIMUM FRAMES whore you are fine. Go with the cheaper option. There is really no legitimate reason to upgrade a cpu for a few years. You will know when you have a cpu bottleneck. That system is pretty identical to mine with the exception that I have an old intel core i5 2500k. Anyways, system looks rad. My Linux server is basically that spec except the graphics card is a NVidia gt 650

Another edit: Normally what people are ranting about when they talk about AMD versus Intel is how many instructions per watt or how many instructions per clock. AMD at least as far as I know used to fail at getting good IPC, instructions per clock. They also have had some heat management issues. But, the flip side is that they make up for it with aggressive clocking of the chip. That is why you see AMD chips are clocked way higher than intel chips. People think this is a benefit but at this point it is false marketing (people in the 80s-90s were conditioned to think this is better). Don't ever trust clock cycle. Ever ever ever. There are trolls out there that will tell you AMD is better cause their clock rates are higher.

If you would like to know why all this is false it has to do with the shift to multicore systems. Multicore or heterogeneous processors became pretty hot when single core chips were getting to hot. Wait I should stop here.... This is becoming a history lesson. Anyways, whatever. If you're interested let me know.

I guess a suggestion of websites you should look at for reviews. I am partial to www.hardocp.com and www.pcper.com .

A warning about hardocp, it is a very right wing website and the forum reflects that. The actual news stuff when it comes to evaluations is on point though. They have the best benchmarking methodology and everyone else at some point copied them. PCPer is run my Ryan Shrout who does a podcast on Leo Laporte's twit network. I find that website a little cumbersome to navigate. But, they are friends with the hardocp guys and also do very similar style evaluations. It really depends on what writing style you like. Personally, I love hardocp's style of presenting the information. It is unbiased. Here are the facts with a little color commentary. You make up your mind (or if your insane already have and refuse to believe what you see).

There's your problem. CPU (and graphics card) fanboys are even worse than console fanboys. There will be tons of people who shit talk anything if it's not from their manufacturer. Just don't listen.

Read reviews from sites that show you if the reviewer actually bought the product. And those sites heap a ton of praise on this chip. You should be fine. Enjoy!

@kadash299: The AMD FX CPUs aren't necessarily bad, but they really can't compete with the last few generations of Intel Core i5/i7 processors. My suggestion would be to drop down to a lower wattage PSU (500-600W will be plenty I assure you), swap out the closed loop liquid cooler for a regular air one (decent air coolers usually outperform closed loops), and use the extra cash to grab a Core i5 4670 or similar.

Agreed with all of the above. Yes, the AMD processors underperform when compared to their Intel brethren. But they are also a hell of a lot more affordable. That 8 core will be just fine for a long, long time. Though I'm not a fan of liquid cooling, I'm a little old school in that regard. I've seen what happens to a PC when the liquid cooler goes wrong, and it ain't pretty. This is especially true if you are building it yourself, and therefore there is no "warranty."

Looks fine to me.

In the vast majority of games your GPU will be the limiting factor (although this might change in the future, some of those next gen ports seem to be unoptimized as fuck in terms of CPU usage).

However, if you're on a budget I guess a simple rule is to invest as much money into your GPU as possible without letting the other components drag it down.

So in your case I might actually look into if you really need that liquid cooling, 750W PSU or 1866Mhz if you could spend some extra bucks on maybe a 770.

I think at the price you spent building your pc (under 1 grand) that looks pretty good. Your pc meets most recommendation and then some on most of the modern pc games. Also I believe at the moment pc games don't really utilize all the cores in a processor at most the first four so I think you're safe. Though who knows now since the new consoles came out and the pc market will probably be raising the ante. For me at the moment I'm running a 6 core processor o/c at 3.6 ghz and I'm able to run battlefield 4 on ultra at around 40-60 on single player. Having shitty internet though kinda counteracts the experience of B4 for me.

Nothing wrong with AMD CPUs. People tend to go for Intel but when trying to save money or allocate more of your budget to other parts of the rig, the AMD FX series are excellent for their cost:performance ratio.

For $800 though you might be able to change some parts and upgrade to the GTX 770. How much are you paying for the CPU cooler and PSU?

Nah that looks fine. I am running an AMD Phenom II 3.0ghz 4 core. Playing battlefield 4 fine with my 680 GTI. If I go ultra then its a little frame droppy but all high its perfect. Deside I cant notice the diffrence between hgh and ultra.

I am 8 gig samsung ram aswell. So I am pretty ghetto on my comp as this is 3 years old now with just a more up to date Video card.

So in my humble opinion your pc build will kick ass for atleast three years.

If you're going to be saving on the CPU side at least go ahead and get a 770

I bought the 760 because i've seen a lot of talk about the MSI card being capable of o/cing to 770 speeds with ease.

@andorski The PSU and Liquid Cooler only costed me a combined total of $75, I got them both 50% off.

If you are already at a comfortable point in your budget, I would leave it alone.

The FX cpu parts are objectively worse than the Intel equivalents (worse performance with much higher power consumption, inferior motherboard related features). But from a practical standpoint the 8320 is a reasonable choice for the money in price:performance. Unless you are shooting for years down the road - in the long term the 8320 will probably cripple a 2016 video card upgrade compared to an i5 from lacking PCIe 3.0 alone - there are no real issues. And by then you could probably cheaply upgrade to a way faster CPU/mobo/memory setup anyway, so net cost difference in 2016 might be minimal.

Getting a liquid cooler for a budget build is probably the biggest unnecessary item (if you need higher performance from overclocking going to an i5 first is cheaper than fancier cooling), but it should allow it to at least run fairly silently. So even that theoretically has a nice benefit on a AMD, especially if you purchase it for a good price.

I read that AMD might be discontinuing the FX series, which would basically leave your motherboard with a dead slot if you ever wanted to upgrade.

I worked myself into a corner by choosing the i7 Intel cpu that I did, MB wise, a few years ago. This last reason might be as the minus for your choice, the most applicable. That's if true, and the board is very narrow in what it supports cpu wise. I sympathize trying to put together an affordable gaming Pc with some headroom.

I'd add that the CPU is the most important part of the build and you should go for the best performance you can afford. Things like GPU's etc can be swapped out much easier down the line and generally a great cpu will last you for 5 years or more if neccessary. If you feel the AMD chip suits you then thats great, just avoid the mind set of going for cheaper parts for core components. Oh and avoid cheap brandless ram and psu's.

@kadash299: for only a $100 more you could have an evga OC'd 770 that wouldn't need to be swapped in a year and a half or so unlike with the 760

@colourful_hippie: I actually got the MSI card for $215 On sale this week brand new, which is why i took the deal.

@kadash299 said:

If you had to come here to ask about your CPU, I would really recommend against overclocking.

It's worse than an Intel counterpart, but it's fine for a budget build because it has a much better price:performance ratio. I put one in my brother's computer this summer and everything's fine. CPUs are almost never a gaming bottleneck anyway.

Honestly, I don't think people are fanboys of either brand. People who build computers go for the product that does what they want and for the right price and the ones that truly are "fanboys" are just idiots. I used to buy AMD when the Athlon processors and Pentium 4 processors were going head to head. The Athlon processors were slower than Pentium 4 by quite a bit in terms of MHz, however, they outperformed the Pentium 4s and were cheaper. The first Intel CPU I ever bought was a Quad Core; everything prior was AMD.

I am sure a lot like myself that have made the switch to Intel are just recommending Intel because the processors still outperform and aren't that much more. I am hoping at some point AMD starts to outperform Intel again.

I am sure if you'd bought 1600mhz ram and dropped that closed loop down to a $20 Coolermaster hyper 212 evo you'd be able to afford a much better performing (for games) intel cpu, but that's still a fairly decent PC for your money.

Yep. That's not fanboyism, that's just the reality. Current Intel chips are more powerful than the AMD equivalents, but the AMD chips aren't terrible, and can be significantly cheaper so they're a good choice for a budget build. Which is pretty much what folks are saying here.

But saying that there aren't CPU fanboys isn't at all what I've seen in certain forums that seem to love the endless (pointless) arguing. So when the OP specifically said that they've heard people "talking shit" about the FX series, my recommendation was just to not pay attention to people shit talking, and listen to people talking facts.

The people who shit-talk it are probably going for bleeding edge and overclocked. Don't worry. You got a sweet rig at a great price.

If you spend any amount of actual time reading reviews and performance comparisons you'd know that AMD processors have been behind intel performance-wise for a long time now. A good intel won't cost you much more and it'll be a noticeable performance increase, but if you want the absolute dirt-cheapest processor then obviously you don't give a fuck about brands and you'll want to buy whatever's cheapest.

Personally I'd recommend you grab an intel at pretty much any price point, but you're free to do what you want.

And personally I'm running battlefield 4 on Ultra on a Phenom II X4 965, with 16GB ram and a 760. I doubt an extra 4 cores and .6 Ghz is going to do be any worse. I don't get why people insist on buying the newest gen of pc tech when you can do perfectly well with a bit older and much cheaper.

I am sure that everyone else on this board has said what I would have said. The Intel parts outperform the AMD parts, but cost more money. If you are the type of person who has to ask a forum about a computer question then the liquid cooling is going to be wasted money. Honestly all CPU coolers are unnecessary if you do not know how to overclock or sleep with a running PC that is right next to your bed.

I would get rid of the cooler, go with a lower powered PSU, then spend the extra money on a better video card.

The CPU has full instruction set compatibility with everything bar Haswell, it drops behind in single threaded loads due to the lower IPC but does fine for the most part in correctly threaded applications. If Mantle ever takes off it won't be of any concern, the new API more or less removes the CPU bottleneck from the equation by killing off the driver layer aspect of the rendering pipeline.

I was in a similar boat and ended up getting an FX 8350. If you can save a bunch of money by sacrificing like 5 frames then I say go for it. I bought a Cooler Master heatsink though and have it overclocked to 4.5Ghz. Runs great too though my 660ti is my real bottleneck, but I still don't feel like I'll need to upgrade it for a while.

Should I just get the i5 4670K instead?

Eh, I would stick with what you got. You've already purchased it and would end up having to swap out the motherboard too.

If you were going to return anything, I would just get rid of the liquid cooling unless you were going to attempt to OC your CPU. The fans that come with the CPU (unless you bought OEM) are just fine.

The CPU is better and only a few bucks more, but at this point it is going to boil down to you wanting to do it. If your not doing video encoding or anything that actually needs a high end CPU, I think you'll be fine. I doubt it'll bottleneck any video games.

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i5-4670K-vs-AMD-FX-8320

I very, very strongly doubt you will notice a difference between top end AMD vs Topish end Intel bar price (I say topish as most top of the range intels are in 4 figures in aus)

I am still using my 8150 and going strong, however I will say one thing that will make a HHUUUGGEEE difference to performance is your Motherboard, buy a good motherboard and you get a huge increase in performance compared to a bad one. The bottlenecks in cheap motherboards are something you don't realize until you have a decent one.

I didn't say newest gen, I said intel, thanks for putting words in my mouth, though. You know intel has past-gen models too, right? They don't magically disappear as soon as the new ones come out.

Single thread performance of Intel is faster than AMD but with more and more games being multithreaded, including next-gen consoles with 8 core CPUs, I think it's going to be an advantage to have 8, albeit slightly slower, cores than 4 slightly faster cores.

Not just games, but also standard applications are becoming a lot more asynchronous. All new applications are going this direction. Looking at Chrome because each tab is a single process -- each process has at minimum 14 threads. Now of course most of them are for mundane inexpensive tasks, but it's still a thread and a lot of applications are like this now.

The problem I am seeing with AMD right now is that they are still using 32nm compared to the 22nm and costs more than twice as much in energy. Considering I leave my computer on 24/7, for me, it is something to factor into my prices. I believe that would qualify as the "commercial cost" which is $190+ vs $73+.

Below is a benchmark for 2 equivalent CPUs that came out at the same time this year.

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i7-4770K-vs-AMD-FX-9590

The motherboard that Microcenter bundled with my 8320 ended up BEING INCOMPADIBLE WITH THE CPU!

Thats right, theyre selling an incompadible bundle. Geniuses.

I ended up taking it back and getting an i5 4670K for only a few bucks more, with a better mo/bo. From what Ive read, its got vastly superior gaming performance comparatively speaking. Anyone with that Processor on here got any reports about its performance?

Haha what? Seriously? Did you buy them off new egg?

@i_stay_puft: No, theres a microcenter down the road from me

FX-8320 is fine. It's what I use alongside an HD7970Ghz and I'm having no issues running most games on Max settings. Your i5 will be fine too. Unless you get super granular, most mid to low-high end components are going to be more than sufficient for a while still.

@monetarydread said:

Nah, stock AMD coolers are rediculously loud. Unless your tower is hidden away, you should upgrade from an AMD fan because they are out of control.

What this guy said; unless you're coding or Photoshopping, there's no reason for top-of-the-line shit. I don't know much about CPU specs, especially AMD's, but chances are it won't be the bottleneck of your system. Don't get sucked into the stupid game of maxing specs.

It's totally fine dude, don't worry. I would say that if you're building a budget computer than you could prolly save a couple hundred dollars from what you spent and still have a comparable computer. Water cooling seems overboard for that rig. 750W Power supply is completely unnecessary. Save your money and buy a 400-600 W Power supply. I would say just get a 4 core pcu as well. No software will support 8 cores. You could get a much faster and cooler processor for a lot less money at 4 cores. Also you'll get a cheaper, tried and true, more dependable motherboard which probably will perform better also.

Lmao... first of all this is a gaming pc. Pretty much all of the amd fx processors can handle all games without getting even close to max usage. Dont buy into this Intel is better and bla bla bla... it doesnt matter.

Intel processors are better, but they are only useful for video/3d rendering. If you're gonna use this pc for games dont buy into this Intel bullshit, AMD is fantastic for gaming.

People who complain about AMD are Intel users, because AMD users are fine with their systems ;)

And I'm rocking an old Phenon II X6 1100t here and not a single game came ever close to maxing it so all I have to say is stfu to those people who keep telling this intel is better bullcrap.

Looks good, might want to make sure the FX thing doesn't come back and bite you if they discontinue it. I got the EVGA X58 Classified 3 Mobo a little over a year ago and guess what.. 1366 CPU's became old and I had to scramble to find an i7 before they were all gone and I was SOL.. classified boards are so nice to, if only cpu's didn't change so fast.

You should be fine, I have an 8350 and have had no problems with it (except when trying to overclock it sadly). The 8320 isn't 4ghz without overclocking though, the turbo mode will go from 3.5 to 4 whenever it feels like it but i don't think it will sustain during gaming without overclocking.

My guess is once games start utilizing more cores, the benefit will start showing for the amd processors. Also since current gen consoles have them, I wouldn't doubt game ports to pc will be better optimized for amd now.

Intel guy here, don't fall for the "AMD vs Intel" just buy whichever you feel like. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter which brand you buy or religiously (if willing to) cock slap at the screen to defend the precious extra Ghz. Remember, google is your friend!

pleb

(Sorry, I had to)

I like to check benchmarks for this kind of matters, here you can find one:

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+FX-8320+Eight-Core

notebookcheck has a better display of the results IMHO, but it focuses on laptops.

To the OP: I just recently got a new machine with identical parts except I have 16GB RAM instead of 8 and I can safely tell ya you didn't go wrong, 8-core CPU with 16GB of RAM is going to last you a shit long time and ignore what most people suggest about AMD being shit CPUS, they are not, and this has been proven over and over again. When it comes to actual live gaming, there is almost nothing in performance between either brands.. AMD have more cores per module, Intel have more threads per core, what this interprets when performance is concerned, Intels are LOT faster at handling data at a faster rate where AMD can handle MORE actual data per core...... You did just fine mate... trust me on that..... There is no point getting an FX 8350 as its just an overclocked version of the 8320, and the 9 series cards are just overclocked versions of the 8350, which you can push the 8350 to anyway, and they are EXTREMELY hot CPUs as well..... 8320s are parable to mid-ranged i7s when it comes to gaming, if your doing other shit that requires data transfer rates to be as fast as possible like rendering, encoding, audio editing and stuff like that, then an i7 is obviously going to be better, but AMD is actually still no slouch when it comes to those things as well, there isn't a HUGE difference just intel is better at it and faster. The New Gen games are going to be multi-core supported now, so would you rather have a full 8-core cpu? it just 4 cores that are dual threaded? Xsplit and OBS already run better on AMD cpus core they are fully 8 cores.... games will definitely start to take advantage of this, which is why Intel is releasing their new 8-core (12 threaded) cpus later this year, but who wants to guess how fucking much those cpus are gonna cost? top end 6-core already costs you a grand? lol

As somebody that went from a 965 black to a 3570k i5, AMD chips are plenty good...no worries.

Still rocking a i7 920 with my new R9 290. I have it overclocked to 3.8Ghz, but even at stock it didn't really get in the way of the GPU during gaming. That CPU is fine for gaming and everyday use. The only time you might have an issue, and all I mean by that is that it might take 1 minute instead of 30 seconds or something of that sort, is if you do a lot of media encoding and/or editing. The biggest thing in games right now is just graphics cards, and enough processor to feed them what they need as fast as they can handle it, and pretty much everything reasonable out there can do a fine job of that, and for the next year or two, that shouldn't change.

Some games are beginning to optimize for more than 2 or 4 cores, and as that happens the CPU may become more important, but until that happens it's all just theory. And you have 6 cores on that thing, so you should be fine even if they start to use more cores than the currently do.