Do AMD cpus at least give a smoother desktop experience w/more cores?

[DAPUNISHER]

OP: your question is hard to answer as "smoother" is not really quantifiable without more context. However I'll try to answer you anyways in what I consider smoother. (less hitching, load times of applications, multi-tasking, gaming, etc).

If I'm interpreting what you mean by smoother then yes of course on modern desktop operating systems more cores will give you a smoother desktop experience than less cores. AMD FX smoother than Intel? No, not unless you're comparing a Core i3 or maybe an i5 in rare cases to an overclocked FX 8320E while having a boatload of applications fighting for CPU resources.

I currently own an AMD FX-8350 and I honestly can't tell the difference between it and my much more expensive Core i7-5930K or 4790K systems for regular tasks. Regular tasks for me being (40'ish tabs in chrome, 20'ish more in Firefox all with CPU intensive adblockers and privacy tools installed, VPN client running, Outlook Mail, Spotify streaming music, BOINC running POEM++, VMWare with a few VM's running, several large PDF's, Excel and Word files open, Anti Malware / Anti Virus, IRC client and usually a photo editor all open and running at the same time, etc).

I suspect it's because I'm never really maxing out any of these processors fully on the desktop and all systems are maxed out RAM wise and have extremely fast SSD's. I do notice a difference while playing some CPU intensive games but not to the point where I feel the 8350 is holding back my Geforce 970 or Radeon 390 from a decent gaming experience. I haven't done extensive testing with Crossfire Fury X's on anything but the 5930K but I suspect the 8350 would handle the cards just fine at 1440P/4K. Freesync and Gsync have helped mask some of the tremendous framerate swings Digital Foundry always likes to harp on so these "lower end" CPU's don't really affect the gaming experience if you have a decent monitor with these capabilities.

All that being said why is there so much hate towards the AMD FX processors around here? or actually AMD in general?

I understand AMD marketing made the FX chips out to be the best thing ever before release (that's what marketing teams are hired for, that's their job, they lie for a living, just like lawyers do) so were you an early adopter and bought one at an inflated price and feel betrayed that you were lied to?

Since release the market have decidedly put these FX chips at the prices they belong and currently they offer a great value if you want a PC that's not excellent at anything specific but pretty good handling most computing tasks provided you have an SSD and a decent amount of RAM (but that's true of almost any processor released in the last five years). If you happen to be lucky enough to live near a Microcenter they are stupid cheap (8320E + FX99 board) for ~$160.00 but even at NewEgg prices they're still a good value. DDR3 is still cheaper than DDR4 and the even some the cheaper FX boards have kept up feature wise (M.2 PCIe, USB 3.1, 1150 audio etc).

Anyways, it's natural to have brand preferences and bias (I fully admit I've written some stupid posts in this area) but I really question some of people on this forum who here who are super pro or vehemently anti (vendor of choice) and feel the need to constantly defend or attack other members for choosing a specific product. Maybe I'm just getting old but try being a little more objective?

My 2 cents.

All that was left after that post, was to drop the mic and walk away :thumbsup:

 

[LPCTech]

Once long ago when my parents and I were leaving the theatre we walked through an alley where an AMD 8350 jumped out and robbed us. I said "You may take our stuff but your single core performance will never match that of an Intel CPU and few applications are designed for multicore." Then the AMD processor shot my parents! He said "Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight while editing and encoding video? Also, Im fast in linux maybe." Then he slowly walked away while sweating profusely.

From that point on I have dedicated myself to roaming forums at night, to stop the unsuspecting from buying an AMD processor. Because no one should have to suffer the use of double the wattage and high heat output for lesser performance, and so the 8350 cannot kill again.

 

[Abwx]

So you have a sample of basically one combination of benchmarks, there are many variables and a major part of the result is obscured.. you can't possibly conclude what you're concluding from this.

You could use whatever else that use 4 threads for Integer and something else that use concurently 4 threads for FP, you could replace Winrar by X264 encoding and Cinebench by whatever is FP heavy.

Rather than the very odd case of HT increasing performance by well over 100% that you'd never see anywhere else, it makes much more sense that for the duration that performance was measured WinRAR was simply scheduled on the four cores for more time than Witcher 3 was. And it's a fairly sensible policy that a new heavy task should take precedence over a long running one.

Having cores which are otherwise idle will force the scheduling policy to be more round-robin because they're nothing else you can really do until you run out of hardware threads. That'll look like a big advantage if you're looking at average performance over some limited interval for a task that runs indefinitely, where it's being de-prioritized, but if you look at combined execution time for two complete finite tasks the story will be different.

It's not even clear what they're actually doing though, nothing's really explained.

Realistically speaking, in terms of total throughput over time they will be at worst around 75-80% of their hyper threading i7 counterpart; you know, the gains from HT that are actual realistic over pretty much any test ever. They won't be some miserable fraction that you think they will and these exotic mixes of threads probably doesn't change that.

This has been discussed and has nothing to do with HT, look at the i3, but is related to L3 cache sizes.

Except the first test on the page, also a "multitasking" test, where i5-2500K is ranked over FX-8350.

I dont see how you are reading this, the 8350 is better than the 2500K in both Winrar and Cinebench and in simultaneaous use it s a slaughter...

In the Winrar + Witcher 3 the 2500K produce 1.7% higher Fps while being much slower than the FX for the compression task, 5mn48 and 4mn34 respectively...

http://www.computerbase.de/2015-10/...m-multitasking-test-winrar-plus-the-witcher-3

 

[coercitiv]

Anyways, it's natural to have brand preferences and bias (I fully admit I've written some stupid posts in this area) but I really question some of people on this forum who here who are super pro or vehemently anti (vendor of choice) and feel the need to constantly defend or attack other members for choosing a specific product. Maybe I'm just getting old but try being a little more objective?

Hehe, maybe this would be a good time to write down an old memory of mine of how I became aware of what bias can do to the unsuspecting mind.

When I was very young, at the beginning of the '90s, my country went through a drastic political change: Eastern European countries were freed from communist regimes. As you can imagine, it was a very exciting time for me, finally being able to come in contact with western culture - cartoons, music, movies, books - you name it. For a while my cultural values were toppled, and I became completely convinced everything western culture produced was superior to what I had back home.

One day I was watching a famous music competition in my country, in which singers performed 2 songs, one in my native tongue, one in English. I felt like the English song sounded much better, so I decided to share my opinion with my grandmother, see if she noticed the difference. I even tried to be as convincing as possible, because this was important to me.

My grandmother candidly replied:
"It's the same song, rules say they perform the same song in English as well."

Fortunately for me I was old enough to learn the lesson right there and then.

 

[AtenRa]

Not sure if serious or delusional.

OH, wait, you're comparing an i3 to an FX-8350 aren't you...in that case I'll agree with your statement.

make that a Core i5

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2460228&highlight=

 

[DrMrLordX]

Once long ago when my parents and I were leaving the theatre we walked through an alley where an AMD 8350 jumped out and robbed us. I said "You may take our stuff but your single core performance will never match that of an Intel CPU and few applications are designed for multicore." Then the AMD processor shot my parents! He said "Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight while editing and encoding video? Also, Im fast in linux maybe." Then he slowly walked away while sweating profusely.

From that point on I have dedicated myself to roaming forums at night, to stop the unsuspecting from buying an AMD processor. Because no one should have to suffer the use of double the wattage and high heat output for lesser performance, and so the 8350 cannot kill again.

+1, would read again. Probably will.

BTW, what does an 8350 sweat anyway? Copper? Nickel?

 

[MarkizSchnitzel]

And no one should. That is not what the culture was/is about. We shared/stealth bragged about how much we could get over stock, and the performance improvement that went with it. We shared which chips from which fabs from which batch were the best. What could you do on a tight budget with it. What could you do if you were willing to throw money at it. From ultra budget board to the highest end, and which settings to use. Physical mods etc. etc.

I still see some of it, but all this versus nonsense has taken over. It is like high school kids of the past, sitting across from each other shouting which group has more spirit.

Hyperbole, obfuscation, talking points, an overclocker craves not these things. :awe:

So basically all of the overclocking scene comes down to luck?
:\

Not surprising than that perf/watt is so much more attractive these days.

 

[cbn]

Smoothly isn't the problem,smoothly with high FPS is the problem.

In some of the newer games they are doing better:

^^^^ FX-6300 looking pretty good there.

 

[cbn]

CPU utilization graphs:

Its looks like Witcher 3 is putting the extra cores to work better than Fallout 4. (Though octocore in Fallout 4 stills does well- see previous post)

 

[mrmt]

Linux IS a kernel. GNU/Linux, or a Linux distro (kernel + userland) is different.

Android uses the Linux kernel, so therefore, Android IS a flavor of Linux.

Android does not use the Linux kernel as is, it's a modified Kernel with a lot of features not found on the standard kernel. Plus there is the Dalvik VM/ART running on top of the Kernel, something not found on any other Linux implementation.m Basically something you write for Android won't run on any Linux distribution, and you should have a hard time to make your Linux application on Android, because the kernel is stripped down and tied to Dalvik/ART.

I agree that there is a point in calling Android Linux, and depending on how loose is your definition of what a platform is it might even fit in and Android would be Linux, but is still a gray zone. Even Linus Torvald thinks Android is more of a fork of Linux than Linux itself. On this one I take the developer/end user instance, since the software development and execution is too different between Android and the rest of the Linux world I wouldn't say that they are the same thing.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Its looks like Witcher 3 is putting the extra cores to work better than Fallout 4. (Though octocore in Fallout 4 stills does well- see previous post)

Remember to account for thread jumping before basing anything of those graphs.

 

[TheELF]

^^^^ FX-6300 looking pretty good there.

Yeah,4-5 frames faster than the second slowest haswell I3...dual core.

 

[TheELF]

Remember to account for thread jumping before basing anything of those graphs.

The witcher 3 easily uses 5-6 threads to a highish degree

 

[cbn]

Yeah,4-5 frames faster than the second slowest haswell I3...dual core.

I think that is the best we have seen it do.

However, with this new game bundle, the price is pretty good now.

(For people who don't like that title I'll bet they could sell the game code on ebay for at least $25 bringing the price of the FX-6300 in line with Athlon x 4 860K).

 

[LTC8K6]

At Newegg it looks like the Wraith cooler is adding $20.

 

[Erenhardt]

Yeah,4-5 frames faster than the second slowest haswell I3...dual core.

But how is that dual core of yours overclocking? Fx6300 can be overclocked by 20% without a sweat on the cheapest motherboards. So on top of the 10% advantage at stock clocks, it gains a lot more.

The value of fx6300 is in its overclocking potential because of low stock clocks. For non overclockers, go with intel or 10% higher clocked fx6350 at least.

 

[TheELF]

But how is that dual core of yours overclocking? Fx6300 can be overclocked by 20% without a sweat on the cheapest motherboards. So on top of the 10% advantage at stock clocks, it gains a lot more.

The value of fx6300 is in its overclocking potential because of low stock clocks. For non overclockers, go with intel or 10% higher clocked fx6350 at least.

Get the 6300 with a cheap mobo and it is completely possible that the 6300 will not even work at stock clocks but throttle heavily due to bad VRM's...
https://www.google.gr/search?q=Fx63...&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8#q=stock+Fx6300+throttling
Yes you can overclock it even on cheap mobos but a large amount of knowledge,parts(for cooling) and LUCK is necessary.
Overclocking a 6300 in not a budged solution.

 

[AtenRa]

Overclocking a 6300 in not a budged solution.

You can OC any FX6300 to 4GHz on any Motherboard with the 970 Chipset.

Example,

BIOSTAR TA970 Ver. 5.3 = $60 on newegg

FX-6300 = $100 on Amazon

 

[Vortex6700]

+1, would read again. Probably will.

BTW, what does an 8350 sweat anyway? Copper? Nickel?

Solder.

 

[MiddleOfTheRoad]

Once long ago when my parents and I were leaving the theatre we walked through an alley where an AMD 8350 jumped out and robbed us. I said "You may take our stuff but your single core performance will never match that of an Intel CPU and few applications are designed for multicore." Then the AMD processor shot my parents! He said "Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight while editing and encoding video? Also, Im fast in linux maybe." Then he slowly walked away while sweating profusely.

Thank you for the epic Batman reference. I am a huge fan of the first Burton movie.....

 

[Abwx]

Get the 6300 with a cheap mobo and it is completely possible that the 6300 will not even work at stock clocks but throttle heavily due to bad VRM's...
https://www.google.gr/search?q=Fx63...&es_sm=122&ie=UTF-8#q=stock+Fx6300+throttling
Yes you can overclock it even on cheap mobos but a large amount of knowledge,parts(for cooling) and LUCK is necessary.
Overclocking a 6300 in not a budged solution.

A random google search to support a point..?.

Like this you mean ?.

https://www.google.gr/search?q=Fx63...s_sm=122&ie=UTF-8#q=stock+i7+4770K+throttling

A FX6300 fully loaded has a 65-66W power dissipation, if ever the number interest you...

 

[jhu]

Android does not use the Linux kernel as is, it's a modified Kernel with a lot of features not found on the standard kernel. Plus there is the Dalvik VM/ART running on top of the Kernel, something not found on any other Linux implementation.m Basically something you write for Android won't run on any Linux distribution, and you should have a hard time to make your Linux application on Android, because the kernel is stripped down and tied to Dalvik/ART.

This is incorrect. I have Debian installed on my phone, and I can run anything that's in the chroot outside in the Android environment.

The term you're looking for is "GNU". Most Linux distributions are more properly called GNU because that's the base userland and does not depend on Linux at all (see Debian/kFreeBSD or Debian/kNetBSD). You are correct, Android is not GNU. But since it's running Linux, it is a Linux, just not GNU.

Do you have the source where Linus says Android is not Linux? He has said that the Linux in Android is a fork (which is pretty obvious). I have not found anywhere where he says it's not Linux.

 

[cbn]

Comparing boards that have M.2 (socket 3) here is what I found;

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...57&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&Order=PRICE&PageSize=30

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...=100007627 600567584 600540657 600540660 4814

Only about a $6 difference comparing the lowest priced boards from AM3+ and LGA 1151 ($81.99 for AMD AM3+ 970 vs. $74.99 for Intel B-150 chipset)

P.S. $81.99 ASRock 970A-G/3.1 is pretty nice in that it does have 8 + 2 VRMs.

 

[TheELF]

A random google search to support a point..?.

Like this you mean ?.

https://www.google.gr/search?q=Fx63...s_sm=122&ie=UTF-8#q=stock+i7+4770K+throttling

A FX6300 fully loaded has a 65-66W power dissipation, if ever the number interest you...

See? Overclocking is always a risk no matter if it is a i7 or the fx-6300.
Also all problems for the i7 are due to the stock fan/temps and not the mobos,although with a cheap mobo you will have the same problems in o/c no matter the CPU.

Yes a random google search will give you an overview of what a random user will face when trying to o/c.

Power dissipation and power draw are not the same,no CPU has 100% conversion rate from power drawn into dissipating heat.

 

[Killrose]

I have an MSi 970 gaming and a FX8320e overclocked to 4.3ghz with a modified/OC R9 290. i'm into playing Warthunder and got back into BFBC2 online gaming. My set-up does fine playing at 1920x1080 everything cranked on a Samsung 23"monitor I got from Costco several years ago. I bought the CPU off ebay on a buy now, and the MSi 970 off of another forum. Both were cheap and "new condition" I know exactly why. All the benches showed up, the FX did'nt do so well and the sellers got pushed by hype into buying more expensive intel set-ups.

Works for me. Paired with the r9 290 which was a previous bitcoin miner I bought locally off Craiglist for $175 it all works very well.