excellent budget am3/am3+ board

[Magic Carpet]

ASRock 970A-G/3.1

Thought, I'd mention it here. Great board, for the features & price. I know it's old and all of that #@#@ yet with modern features. Anybody who needs a decent one, this is it. Power delivery seems to be suitable for moderate overclocking too. Nice layout indeed. Specs here. Likely one of the last AM3+ boards released before the transition to AM4 takes place later this year. Jump in. Supports EVERY AM3/AM3+ CPU out there!

 

[lehtv]

Why not actually mention what the board is

 

[nenforcer]

Yeah quite a few manufacturers have been sneeking in updated AM3+ 990FX and 970 chipset based boards these last few months.

 

[Magic Carpet]

That ASRock board along with the 8300 represent amazing value for general computing, imo. Larry & Waltchan, get in !!! The FX comes with the box cooler which is more than enough for stock clocks. All for less than $200, unless you require the on-die GPU/AVX2/performance-per-watt/core metric, this one is a classic Mustang. And its got solder under the hood, what's not to like?

Stock clocks for both i3 (similarly priced) and FX, compared to my Haswell-WS & stock 6700K.

I actually ended up running prime all night at 4.2GHz with that voltage.
This is an exceptional chip for someone wanting to just go with a stock setup Source

 

[LTC8K6]

Where are those numbers from and what were the system specs?

Without that info, the numbers are less meaningful.

 

[LTC8K6]

For instance, it looks like your chosen FX-8300 system was using 1600CL11 DDR3 and was overclocked...which seems quite odd...

http://www.passmark.com/baselines/V8/display.php?id=55216058806

 

[Magic Carpet]

Where are those numbers from and what were the system specs?

Without that info, the numbers are less meaningful.

Where are those numbers from and what were the system specs?

For instance, it looks like your chosen FX-8300 system was using 1600CL11 DDR3 and was overclocked...which seems quite odd...]

Here's the FX overclocked to 4.2 on all cores. Feel the difference. The ST/SC performance of the stock 8300 is quite decent.

It gives you a general idea how it performs. You can figure out the clocks easily, lots of samples available on the internet.

For the money, that board + fx combined w/ GTX 950/960 dGPU, 32 gigs of RAM, Windows 10 x64 + Google Chrome. I'd say, it's going to perform admirably well in most general computing tasks, even at stock. But if you have the money, or want to have on-die graphics, definitely 6700K is the better way to go around that problem, no matter the price. Nice to have options.

 

[Leyawiin]

I put together an AM3+ system this spring just for the hell of it (got a mobo and FX- 8320E kind of dumped in my lap when a family member canceled a build). Got the CPU @ 4.4 Ghz and its not too bad. Of course my i7-4790k is better, but I was pleasantly surprised by the FX. I was toying around with DSR on a GTX 970 recently in Fallout 4 and setting it to just 1600p (from a native 1200p) the FX has slightly higher FPS and smoother game play in non-CPU intensive areas (basically anywhere but downtown) than the i7 using the same GPU and same in game settings. Weird. Used 4K DSR in WoW and they're exactly the same (GPU limited I guess).

Of course I'd still rather have Intel if building completely from scratch though.

 

[LTC8K6]

You don't need to sell the FX to me...I own one and have owned a few.

Who would hamper the FX-8300 with that ram, though? And then overclock it. It makes no sense to me at all.

Surely it will do better with some good 1866 ram that it's meant to be paired with?

 

[Magic Carpet]

Who would hamper the FX-8300 with that ram, though? And then overclock it. It makes no sense to me at all.

That's more of an afterthought. My original point was, if you only have $120 for the CPU, this FX coupled with that quality board seems like a good option for modern gaming. I suspect, games are going to get more regularly threaded. Pretty much every DX12 title is going to perform well on this ageing CPU. For the money, why not! I'd rather have that over a similarly priced i3, or maybe even a lowly clocked i5.

At Nixxes we have a long history of working with consoles as well, and one of the large differences between developing for consoles and developing for PCs is the level of access to the hardware available to us. We can leverage every single hardware feature and every bit of CPU power available in the most efficient way possible. With DirectX 12 we are taking a massive step forwards for bringing a lot of that flexibility to the PC as well. For Rise of the Tomb Raider the largest gain DirectX 12 will give us is the ability to spread our CPU rendering work over all CPU cores, without introducing additional overhead. This is especially important on 8-core CPUs like Intel i7’s or many AMD FX processors.

>=8T CPUs are going to be my recommendation for modern gaming.

In a few years, Intel is likely going to introduce a 6-core SKU to the mainstream platform. It's time for 4C/8T to get relegated one tier down. This is especially true, because we already have 10 cores for the enthusiast platform released later this year. Looks like, long term 6700K is looking less and less appealing (compared with 5820K), at least in my eyes. Can't wait for BD-E/Zen to get released soon enough.

 

[LTC8K6]

As long as 4C/4T and 4C/8T beats 8C/8T within a reasonable price range, the status quo will remain...

That is still the case. FX is still far behind. That will have to change before old AM3(+) chips become popular. Even then, people are far less likely to invest in dead end motherboards just to run older chips, when new AMD chips are coming soon.

Intel is only introducing a HEDT chips with more cores, not MSDT chips. These HEDT chips will not be for mainstream users.

I have seen no sign of a mainstream desktop chip from Intel with more than 4 cores.

We all know that it is AMD's ZEN that is supposed to be the game changer with more cores.
If the new AMD chips are not a lot faster than FX, what might that tell us? And won't that hurt sales for AMD?

I think for AMD's sake, new chips had better put FX in the back seat by a lot.

 

[nenforcer]

As long as 4C/4T and 4C/8T beats 8C/8T within a reasonable price range, the status quo will remain...

That is still the case. FX is still far behind. That will have to change before old AM3(+) chips become popular. Even then, people are far less likely to invest in dead end motherboards just to run older chips, when new AMD chips are coming soon.

Intel is only introducing a HEDT chips with more cores, not MSDT chips. These HEDT chips will not be for mainstream users.

I have seen no sign of a mainstream desktop chip from Intel with more than 4 cores.

I was disappointed in the performance of my FX-8350 with R9 285 2GB on Star Wars: Battlefront on the Tatooine level where I get repetetive and almost predictable slowdown with 40 players. I don't have this issue with my older Core i7 -950 and Geforce GTX 560 Ti 2GB probably due to nVidida better threaded DirectX 11 driver. Now if ST:Battlefront had an AMD Mantle version like it should have this could be a different story.

We all know that it is AMD's ZEN that is supposed to be the game changer with more cores.
If the new AMD chips are not a lot faster than FX, what might that tell us? And won't that hurt sales for AMD?

I think for AMD's sake, new chips had better put FX in the back seat by a lot.

Jumping from .32nm SOI to .16nm FinFET is a massive jump alone. Coupled with the new Jim Keller design I'm expecting it to put AMD back in the mix in chips < $300. I'm wondering if they are going to call it a new FX or revert back to the Phenom series?

 

[xLegenday]

That ASRock board along with the 8300 represent amazing value for general computing, imo. Larry & Waltchan, get in !!! The FX comes with the box cooler which is more than enough for stock clocks. All for less than $200, unless you require the on-die GPU/AVX2/performance-per-watt/core metric, this one is a classic Mustang. And its got solder under the hood, what's not to like?

Stock clocks for both i3 (similarly priced) and FX, compared to my Haswell-WS & stock 6700K.

Well said!

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'm wondering if they are going to call it a new FX or revert back to the Phenom series?

I've got one for them - Simply "Phenom X". Kind of like "Fury X", their high-end GPU name. It's a natural.