Best AMD chip for playing games

[miaustin]

Hello. Been reading the forums a while but signed up because now I need some advice

I wanted to know which would be the best AMD CPU to buy for gaming. I was thinking between the AMD FX-8350 and the new one, the AMD A10-7850K. I assumed the A10 would be better because it's newer, supports faster ram, and it has Mantle (which seems to be good, you can run it as dual gpu with a dedicated I think?). But looking over on this site (link here) it makes it look like the older FX one is better, especially in benchmarks.

They seem about the same price. Advice please? ^_^

 

[R0H1T]

AMD FX-8350 that is if you're pairing it with a nice dGPU, like the 290x, but if you don't plan on adding a separate GPU then the A10 is your best bet, even after taking Intel's chips into consideration.

 

[NTMBK]

The 8350 would be the best of the two, by quite a large margin. It has double the number of cores.

However, you might want to consider an Intel chip- a Core i5 will generally outperform the 8350 signficantly in games.

 

[TeknoBug]

They're about the same in terms of performance but you pay less for electricity with the 7850K and don't have to buy an expensive discrete GPU (I still suggest that you do), personally I'm waiting for a Kaveri Athlon X4 variant for the FM2+ socket. My A10 7700K with a GTX750Ti runs pretty nicely and sips power.

If you don't already have an AM3+ socket board, then I'd say go with the FM2+ as AM3+ is a dead end now.

 

[sm625]

Only buy the A10-7850K if you plan on building a severely budget and size restricted limited gaming PC, one that will be running a monitor resolution like 1280x1024 or possibly 1680x1050. If you want 1920x1080 gaming, you will need a discrete GPU. If you go with a discrete video card, then half the A10-7850K chip goes to waste, making it a very bad purchase. You need to decide whether the integrated gpu of the A10 is not only good enough for you today, but will it be good enough for you for the life of the machine? If the answer is no, then it is not an economical choice to build a system around.

 

[Essence_of_War]

I wanted to know which would be the best AMD CPU to buy for gaming
...
They seem about the same price. Advice please?

What's your budget and what's your form factor?

If you want a compact/SFF gaming console replacement, the A10 is the obvious choice. If you're building an ATX tower and plan on having a dgpu also, I'd go with the FX 8320 or 6300 and OC to 8350/6350 speeds.

If you're on a tight budget, the answer is 'neither'. Either wait for an athlon version of kaveri, or pick up a richland athlon and try to throw as much money at a dgpu as possible.

 

[davie jambo]

The 8350 would be the best of the two, by quite a large margin. It has double the number of cores.

However, you might want to consider an Intel chip- a Core i5 will generally outperform the 8350 signficantly in games.

Nonsense

 

[Yuriman]

AMD's best chip is going to be the one that frees up the most budget to spend on a video card. FX-6300 (6 core), so long as socket AM3+ doesn't bother you too much, or arguably an Athlon x4 760K (4 core) if your budget is even lower. Socket FM2 has a more modern chipset and more features.

The A10 will probably come out about even with the 8350 in lightly threaded games (i.e. GW2) and fall way behind in heavily threaded games (i.e. BF4). Kaveri brings some IPC increases to the table, but is built on a process that, in theory, reduces your maximum potential overclock. If you don't plan to use the integrated GPU on Kaveri, you're wasting something like 70% of the chip, and it's not as fast as an entry level HD7750 so if you're a gamer you're probably not going to use it. The FX-8350 doesn't have an iGPU.

For reference to Intel's offerings, the FX-6300 is pretty comparable to the similarly priced i3 (2 core + HT), losing badly in lightly threaded games even when heavily overclocked vs a stock i3, but it pulling ahead in others that can make use of its extra cores. The FX-8350 (8 cores) loses very badly in lightly threaded games to an i5 (4 cores), and generally breaks even or wins slightly in games that can use 6+ cores. It's worth noting that an FX-8350 is generally cheaper than an i5 though is on an older platform, and also that, even when "losing very badly", most if not all games are still very playable. On a 60hz monitor it's probably a moot point.

 

[miaustin]

Ahh, so much to think about! At work at the moment but will read through all of this again later. Thanks very much!

 

[NTMBK]

Nonsense

Sorry, which particular part do you think is nonsense?

 

[Maximilian]

Nonsense

Theres a well constructed arguement :thumbsup: You've sure changed my mind on the subject :awe:

Only games that the 8350 wins in are games built to take advantage of more than 4 cores like BF4. These kinds of games are rare.

That said the 8320 is great value for what you get.

 

[Arkaign]

Yep, i5 is faster in virtually all games, and that's not likely to change. Another thing to consider is that most comparisons compare stock v stock frequency, and 8350 doesn't have a ton of room to improve in that regard, plus when you close on 5Ghz with Vishera you need pretty damn robust cooling and mobos, skewing the price even more.

A 4670K @ 4.4Ghz (doable with the right chip) or even at 4.2Ghz (virtually a lock) will dominate an OC'd 8350 at gaming, period.

That's not to say the 8350 is a bad chip necessarily. In GPU-limited situations, it can even be indistinguishable. I don't like to use that as a full excuse for a weaker CPU though, as time goes on you might get a newer GPU, and then expose the limitation of the weaker CPU with newer games.

At the same time, stuff like Mantle and DX12, and the new OpenGL standards may reduce somewhat the extreme CPU limitations.

I install thousands of the damned things, and can comfortably say after immense customer feedback that the 8350 is quite good, and the i5s/i7s are outstanding. There's no sense that someone would be disappointed by either in conjunction with a good GPU for gaming.

 

[Squeetard]

Here is a good alternative to AMD.

Not funny. This is inflammatory and thread crapping
This is not allowed here, and this buys you an infraction.
Markfw900
Anandtech Moderator

 

[Arkaign]

Here is a good alternative to AMD.

BAN!

 

[monkeydelmagico]

If you are gaming then you should buy a dedicated GPU. If your buying a dedicated GPU the FX CPU is the better choice.

 

[nwo]

Unless you are on a tight budget or tight power limitations, there is no reason to get the A10 7850k over an FX 8350.

A10 7850k is perfectly capable of running most games smoothly on the integrated GPU, so if that's what you're looking for then go for it. But if you want the best performance, go with the FX 8350, OC it, and pair it up with a dedicated graphics card.

 

[Redinit]

They're about the same in terms of performance but you pay less for electricity with the 7850K and don't have to buy an expensive discrete GPU (I still suggest that you do), personally I'm waiting for a Kaveri Athlon X4 variant for the FM2+ socket. My A10 7700K with a GTX750Ti runs pretty nicely and sips power.

If you don't already have an AM3+ socket board, then I'd say go with the FM2+ as AM3+ is a dead end now.

If he's gaming then he is going to want a dedicated GPU. And the FX-8350 has almost double the benchmark score than the A10-7850K. But that makes sense considering it uses less electricity.

 

[monstercameron]

how I see it:

• fx8320 best bang for the buck with a healthy oc and a dgpu
• a10-7850k best bang for the buck for a budget and/or size restricted system

aside: the a10-7850k can easily handle many games at 1080p maxed out, albeit at ~30 fps, with a little tweaking it is possible to hit 60fps. Games like league of legends and smite play very well. Also bf4 at 1600*900, low and 2xmsaa, never dips below 30fps on a 64 man server, that is with mantle of course .

 

[TeknoBug]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlzJ2XbVPnk

A little clip of BF4 @ 1080p I recorded with an A10 6800K (using a 560Ti), a 7850K will do a touch better.

 

[Yuriman]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlzJ2XbVPnk

A little clip of BF4 @ 1080p I recorded with an A10 6800K (using a 560Ti), a 7850K will do a touch better.

Unfortunately it's within $5 of a Haswell i5. Makes literally no sense if you have a discrete GPU. Given that, I feel it's an extremely poor choice. If boycotting Intel, you can get nearly the same CPU for <$90 with the iGPU disabled.

 

[monstercameron]

I am certain there are reasons to want an apu and still use a dgpu. This scenario might be temporal as the user might start with an apu then later upgrade to a beefy dgpu.
Another corner case is an indie developer wanting to debug mantle/true audio in their software.

 

[Red Hawk]

Nonsense

Not so nonsense. The 8350 more often than not loses to the i5-2500K, let alone the i5-3570K.

 

[SPBHM]

if you are comparing the 8350 to the 7850K you are probably going to use a graphics card and not the IGP.

as a CPU only (if you use fast discrete graphics) the 7850K is not really much different compared to the Athlon 760K, which is half the price...

the 8350 is also hard to justify compared to the 8320 ($40 cheaper at newegg) if you can do a 500MHz OC on the 8320...

so yes... none... if you really need to ignore Intel I recommend looking at the 760k, 6300 or 8320....

 

[escrow4]

Not so nonsense. The 8350 more often than not loses to the i5-2500K, let alone the i5-3570K.

Let alone Haswell, or Broadwell in a few months, or Skylake sometime next year which will utterly demolish it. False economy buying an antique CPU on an obsolete socket.

 

[Maximilian]

Not so nonsense. The 8350 more often than not loses to the i5-2500K, let alone the i5-3570K.

Yeah but all those games use 1 or at a push 2 cores. Not entirely fair, there should be one of these games that can use 4+ cores thrown in there: BC2/BF3/BF4.