How does this $80 AMD stack up against a Core i3 540?

[schmuckley]

eh..not well when it comes to FPS.
A Clarkdale OC'd would outperform in games..or anything newer.

 

[TeknoBug]

The FM2 Athlon X4 750/760 are nice chips, but for modern games it'll sit down near the bottom of the list, GPU intensive games will run ok on it but MMO and RTS games will choke that CPU. For $30 more you can get an i3 4130 and it runs loops around the X4 760K.

A couple of Geforce 750(ti)'s would make a world of difference.

No SLI capacity on those.

 

[tential]

SC2 loves intel

Sc2 loves single threaded performance.

intel is good at that.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

No SLI capacity on those.

Meant one for each... :thumbsup:

 

[Gikaseixas]

OP plays games that favour Intel, games that are dependent on single thread performance and asks if an Athlon chip can be considered in this scenario. Ofcourse AMD sucks in these games but things change if you pick better threaded games duh
The new Haswell dual cores are simply great so if you want comparable performance from AMD you gotta go with FX6xxx minimum

 

[pyjujiop]

I didnt know AMD was so bad for Blizzard games.

AMD processors struggle on any games that are heavily dependent on single-thread performance. The only way to get single-threaded performance in the same ballpark as an Intel chip is to buy an FX and overclock it, and even then the Intel will often win.

AMD is very good value for the money if you can use all of the cores; otherwise, it's not.

 

[sm625]

According to this benchmark, you would see acceptable Diablo 3 performance simply by upgrading the X2 to a phenom II X4. Your min framerates should at least double. Your X2 would score well below the E8400 on that chart - about halfway between an E8400 and the X2-4200.

 

[SPBHM]

According to this benchmark, you would see acceptable Diablo 3 performance simply by upgrading the X2 to a phenom II X4. Your min framerates should at least double. Your X2 would score well below the E8400 on that chart - about halfway between an E8400 and the X2-4200.

I think this game loves the l3 cache, like SC2 showing big gains with PII northbridge OC, so yes...

 

[john5220]

According to this benchmark, you would see acceptable Diablo 3 performance simply by upgrading the X2 to a phenom II X4. Your min framerates should at least double. Your X2 would score well below the E8400 on that chart - about halfway between an E8400 and the X2-4200.

problem with this image u posted

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/screenshots/original/2012/05/Diablo-3-CPU-Bench.png

is that review sites are clueless on how to benchmark.

127 FPS in new tristram? LOL betting its also normal mode he was playing

today we have torment 6 difficulty that has 1 billion times more enemies on the screen than what they tested that game with infact even back then you could do monster power

in reality a i7 haswell with GTX 680 drops to 40 FPS playing Reaper of Souls at certain points.

 

[Justinbaileyman]

You guys are so full of crap and 750K-760K Isnt a Athlon regor core!! Its based on the new Richland core and would completely destroy any and all Core i3 Cpu's. Take it from some one who has both. I say get a 750K since they can be had for about $60-70 bucks.
Set it to 4.4-4.5Ghz by setting your multi to 44 or 45 and you'll be in business. I am so sick of this amd sucks this and that. He isnt buying a core i7 for $3 or $400.00 bucks. For gods sake people know what the hell your talking about before replying.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

For gods sake people know what the hell your talking about before replying.

Well, my media-centre/HTPC is 6800K-powered...

If I didn't have a need for high performance, it'd be more then fast enough for my daily needs. The thing here is that the OP is specifically inquiring about SC2 and Diablo 3 performance, those games heavily favour Intel CPUs. Otherwise the Athlon is just perfect for budget gaming, especially if getting an Athlon means you can afford a "bigger" graphics card. It gets even better when you start overclocking it. (see below)

AMD doesn't "suck", it just has some specific requirements for optimal performance (good multithreading). At default clocks my 6800K can beat almost every single Ivy i3, except in single threaded workloads (and except the 3250). For what it is, it does tremendously well at video encoding, which just happens to be a workload that fits an HTPC perfectly. Sips power too. 22W idle, 30-35W decoding bluray-quality video, from an external bluray drive.

 

[nwo]

I had a 512mb HD4870 with my i5 3570k. I played d3 with it for like a day. It wasn't too bad. I was able to run maxed out most of the time with some fps dips, usually down to the 30s. An i3 would be comparable in performance. You really shouldn't go down any lower than a pentium though if you except to get decent gaming performance.

Athlons are horrible at Blizzard games since their single threaded performance is so much lower than Intel. Their only advantage over the Pentiums are the extra cores, which are worthless since Blizzard games run only on 2 cores. Only way Athlons can compete with low end Intel CPUs is if you overclock the heck out of them.