Is there any reason to use FX CPUs right now?

[Ramses]

+1.

Here are some recent prices I paid on Steam and Origin starting in 2014:

Battlefield 3 $0
Battlefield 4 $5
TitanFall $5
Crysis 3 $6

Didn't try Titanfall but the other three ran great on my 9590/280x xfire @1080p. I'm sure they would have been fine on the 8350 as well. I don't play online and I don't disbelieve that bf4 with the fabled "64 player map" or whatever it is might have some lag, not my thing though. Crysis3 ran great on that rig, well written game.

Starting with an old 955BE I horse traded/bought/sold my way to that 9590 for $160, and it sold after I used it for 5 months at $190. And it sold quickly, so did the 8350 and the 1090T. AMD has been good to my wallet and provided pretty awesome gaming, productivity and tweaking experience the last few years.

 

[Smoblikat]

Honestly, AMD needs to shrink Phenom 2 to 28nm or 32nm, slap a couple extra cores in there and call it a day. Of course, at this point that doesnt make any monetary sense, but its what should have happened instead of faildozer.

As it stands now, if you can get an FX 83XX for around $75, it might be worth it just to tinker with. Otherwise FX series are irrelevant.

 

[Maximilian]

I like my motherboard.. USB 3.0, SATA6, 4x PCIE 2.0 x 16 slots, 12+2 power phases. It lacks some new stuff (I don't need M.2), but gets the job done.

Looks good :thumbsup: Haven't seen a firewire port on a mobo in ages though!

 

[Ramses]

double

 

[AtenRa]

Honestly, AMD needs to shrink Phenom 2 to 28nm or 32nm, slap a couple extra cores in there and call it a day. Of course, at this point that doesnt make any monetary sense, but its what should have happened instead of faildozer.

As it stands now, if you can get an FX 83XX for around $75, it might be worth it just to tinker with. Otherwise FX series are irrelevant.

If your signature is up to date, i would prefer an FX83xx@ 4.4GHz + 2x R9 290 or even a single OCed 290X every day than the Core i7 3770K with those 4x HD6970.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Looks good :thumbsup: Haven't seen a firewire port on a mobo in ages though!

And PS/2 ports!

My build isn't really the right build to bring out the bang for the buck merits of the FX line up. My build was a complete hobbyist build. The motherboard isn't very cheap, but... dat power phase. :twisted: The FX sucks a lot of power when you get it above ~4.8-4.9GHz or so.

 

[Ramses]

And PS/2 ports!

My build isn't really the right build to bring out the bang for the buck merits of the FX line up. My build was a complete hobbyist build. The motherboard isn't very cheap, but... dat power phase. :twisted: The FX sucks a lot of power when you get it above ~4.8-4.9GHz or so.

I had that board first under the 8350, great board other than I had philosophical issues with the fan management. Replaced it with a Sabertooth r2. Both great boards though.

Most people don't get this, but another draw of AMD to me was that there were like, half a dozen high end 990fx boards, and none of them were much over $200, if you discount the bling gamer boards even less. It was easy to sort out the features/attributes and they were fairly cheap ($180ish). Intel stuff, there's like 30 and a quarter of them are crazy money. The multiple chipsets and sockets and excessive board options were a big turnoff. I'm OCD enough that I end up making spreadsheets noting features and price and run through them over and over till I narrow down the ideal board, anything less I'm not satisfied with. I was puzzled for awhile why some high end boards had this feature, but not that, and another had that, but not this, till I figured out they were out of pcie lanes which was a real disappointment. I bought a z97-ws (for $220) to go with the 4790K and am not totally satisfied with the choice but I had to decide on something. It was just annoying, AMD's stuff was much quicker and easier to sort through. I get the buy an i5 and a cheap board idea but that's just not me as an enthusiast, if I had to do that I'd just use my laptop.

 

[svarog19]

I just got those prices from Newegg.ca this morning. Yes they are the current pricing.

I used prices from US as Anandtech is primarily used by people from USA.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/444?vs=1289

Stock for stock the 990x is 10-20% faster than the 9590.

Overclocked it will easily keep that advantage.

Don't go off-topic... :awe:

It was about FX 8350 vs Xeon 5650 on stock clocks and Xeon 5650 would lose in majority of benchmarks and specially in case you want to play games on it. StarCraft 2 would ran 30% faster on FX 8350 than Xeon 5650 which was being discussed.

Anyway you can only buy used i7 990X by now and you'd be lucky if you could buy unused one or even a retailer that still sells it so you can also have a warranty for it. :hmm:

 

[Ramses]

Anyway you can only buy used i7 990X by now and you'd be lucky if you could buy unused one or even a retailer that still sells it so you can also have a warranty for it. :hmm:

$600 used/$1200 new on Amazon, and a bargain at any price lol....

 

[MiddleOfTheRoad]

@MoToR:

I dont understand what you are saying either. How can an i5 be a bad as you make it sound, and an i7 so much better. The absolute maximum increase I have seen in any benchmark is around 30% due to hyperthreading. So if the order of power is i5<FX<i7,
how much faster is the i7 vs the i5? If there is a total spread of 30% between the i5 and i7, based on general best case scenario for hyperthreading, how can the FX be so much better than the i5. Maybe I am all wrong here, I admit I am not familiar with your workload, but based on everything I have seen about i5 vs i7 what you are saying does not make sense to me.

BOINC doesn't work that way. Each thread a CPU can process, gets an individual project to process. So a Celeron/Pentium runs 2 projects at once, an i5 with 4 threads runs 4 projects simultaneously, an FX-6300 get 6, an i7 or octocore FX each get 8, an i7 5960x can process 16 projects. More threads = more projects at once. If I had to estimate -- I'd guess hyperthreading is probably close to a 50 - 70% gain on Boinc because it doubles the workload.

Here is the example of a Projects screen in BOINC:

The above screenshot is probably an FX-6300 or an 8 threaded CPU with CPU usage limited to 6 cores.

The slower IPC of AMD does hold them back, but doubling the # of projects being processed at once still allows an FX 8320 to leapfrog our Ivy i5 in daily points by a very wide margins (An FX can generate about 10,000 more points on a daily basis from personal experience). The FX is running 8 projects vs 4 on the i5. Each individual project does finish faster on the i5, but the faster IPC can't keep up with the FX doubling the simultaneous workload. Obviously, the newer i7's (especially since they can run 16 projects simultaneously) -- will demolish any FX. But an octocore FX still is probably a much better CPU for multithreaded scientific computing that rely on integer performance than just about any i5. It took years of trial and error (and I tested everything I ever had including Atoms and Via stuff -- which BTW are totally useless CPU's for running BOINC, way too slow).

 

[PC Master Race]

I used prices from US

So why would you refute Canadian pricing with American pricing then ? AMD FX is priced to high in Canada right now as are every other piece of computer hardware. But the thing is the only way AMD FX is even viable is when you can get one for around $100 bucks but in Canada that will never happen. I paid an extra $50 bucks for an intel platform over an AMD FX 8350 platform and IMHO the Intel offerd better price/performance so that's what i went with.

 

[Ramses]

Everything's expensive up north far as I can tell, I have a lot of customers that buy from our side of the border and have it shipped to just on our side and shoot across to pick it up. Even with tax and shipping and such most of em still say it's cheaper to order from us.

 

[Yuriman]

@MiddleOfTheRoad, how you put it is confusing though. Number of projects is not relevant, because a quad core Q6600 would turn in 4 projects in the same time a dual core Haswell Pentium turns in 4 - because the Pentium is turning them in twice as fast.

If an i5 has ~60% better IPC than an FX, and both are clocked the same, the i5 will still only turn in 6.5 projects for every 8 an FX turns in, because the FX has more total throughput. However, if an i7 is gaining another 50% from hyperthreading, it will be turning in 9.75 for every 8 an FX turns in.

The problem with the FX is not its total throughput - it's still a respectably fast chip, especially considering its price - but with how it's distributed across its cores. An i7 effectively has 4 very fast cores, 60%+ faster each than an FX core, and 4 slower "cores" from HT. This is a better way of distributing things because with the same total throughput you have significantly better performance in loads that can't scale well or distribute across a lot of cores, which is nearly all loads non-scientific in nature.

 

[MiddleOfTheRoad]

And yet the facts disagree with your opinions. And fyi, 3.5 million WCG points isn't all that much. I have 50 times that and my team has 27 billion.

I suspect your team has more than 2 people on it.

Now prove what your saying is true. Because I'm pretty confident you are being dishonest. Specifically, please link your individual member page with 175 Million points..... I'm waiting. You can just PM if you don't want it public. I'll happily PM you mine. But seriously, I call BS. Unless you've got a Cray supercomputer in your bedroom. Simply put -- a current top notch desktop PC (like a Haswell) running 24 hours a day would need around 16 years to generate 175 million points.

I'm pretty confident I already know the answer:
Anyone who is arguing that a 4 threaded i5 is superior to an 8 threaded FX seems pretty confused about how World Community Grid works. So now the world is waiting. Back up what your saying with some proof -- because my personal experience with these specific chips doesn't jive at all..... You just seem way off.... How many FX chips have you run on the grid? How many i5's? How many i7's?

 

[MiddleOfTheRoad]

@MiddleOfTheRoad, how you put it is confusing though. Number of projects is not relevant, because a quad core Q6600 would turn in 4 projects in the same time a dual core Haswell Pentium turns in 4 - because the Pentium is turning them in twice as fast.

If an i5 has ~60% better IPC than an FX, and both are clocked the same, the i5 will still only turn in 6.5 projects for every 8 an FX turns in, because the FX has more total throughput. However, if an i7 is gaining another 50% from hyperthreading, it will be turning in 9.75 for every 8 an FX turns in.

The problem with the FX is not its total throughput - it's still a respectably fast chip, especially considering its price - but with how it's distributed across its cores. An i7 effectively has 4 very fast cores, 60%+ faster each than an FX core, and 4 slower "cores" from HT. This is a better way of distributing things because with the same total throughput you have significantly better performance in loads that can't scale well or distribute across a lot of cores, which is nearly all loads non-scientific in nature.

That's all very true. I was just speaking in the most basic terms. An overclocked Haswell i5 could very possibly be faster than an 8 core FX (especially Zambezi).....
I know our Ivy i5 just couldn't keep up with the Vishera FX 8320....

In general, the more simultaneous projects a person can run is equal to the higher daily points generated on the World Community Grid. It does get messy fast once you start comparing different generations, IPC and thread counts -- and much of what I have learned was from trial and error. Also keep in mind -- different projects favor different chips. World Community Grid is biased towards chips with good integer performance which is why the FX is well suited. SETI@home is more biased towards strong floating point -- so Intel or Thuban chips are usually much better suited and the FX's really struggle.

 

[svarog19]

$600 used/$1200 new on Amazon, and a bargain at any price lol....

Yikes... You could for 600$ buy a new FX 8320 and a high end air cooler then overclock it to 4.4Ghz easy then buy four 8GB 1600/1800Mhz CAS 9 Dimms for that price and even fit a high end motherboard at that. :thumbsup:

So why would you refute Canadian pricing with American pricing then ? AMD FX is priced to high in Canada right now as are every other piece of computer hardware. But the thing is the only way AMD FX is even viable is when you can get one for around $100 bucks but in Canada that will never happen. I paid an extra $50 bucks for an intel platform over an AMD FX 8350 platform and IMHO the Intel offerd better price/performance so that's what i went with.

When I see Newegg I think about Newegg US and I never knew there was Newegg Canada.

You should have imported it from US, you would save additional $$$.

Everything's expensive up north far as I can tell, I have a lot of customers that buy from our side of the border and have it shipped to just on our side and shoot across to pick it up. Even with tax and shipping and such most of em still say it's cheaper to order from us.

Wow...

 

[ShintaiDK]

Everything's expensive up north far as I can tell, I have a lot of customers that buy from our side of the border and have it shipped to just on our side and shoot across to pick it up. Even with tax and shipping and such most of em still say it's cheaper to order from us.

Really?

https://www.google.com/finance?q=usdcad

Example:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-372-_-Product
Vs.
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product...=-1&amp;isNodeId=1

239*~1,25=~299CAD$. Cheaper to buy it from Newegg.ca at 279CAD$ than Newegg.com.

Newegg.ca sells the CPU for 223USD$ if you wish to go the other way vs Newegg.com 239$.

 

[Ramses]

Got me man, I'm just repeating what my Canadian customers been telling me for the last six years. I sell vintage European car parts, not PC parts. The factory dealers up there are particularly brutal on markup vs US dealers.

 

[Phynaz]

I suspect your team has more than 2 people on it.

Now prove what your saying is true. Because I'm pretty confident you are being dishonest. Specifically, please link your individual member page with 175 Million points..... I'm waiting. You can just PM if you don't want it public. I'll happily PM you mine. But seriously, I call BS. Unless you've got a Cray supercomputer in your bedroom. Simply put -- a current top notch desktop PC (like a Haswell) running 24 hours a day would need around 16 years to generate 175 million points.

I'm pretty confident I already know the answer:
Anyone who is arguing that a 4 threaded i5 is superior to an 8 threaded FX seems pretty confused about how World Community Grid works. So now the world is waiting. Back up what your saying with some proof -- because my personal experience with these specific chips doesn't jive at all..... You just seem way off.... How many FX chips have you run on the grid? How many i5's? How many i7's?

I had 166 years of cpu time when I quit crunching in summer 2012. Never did I say I was running only one system.

You now have more than enough information to figure out who I am on WCG if it matters to you. With that info you can then find me on Boincstats and look at each of the machines I was running.

 

[MiddleOfTheRoad]

I had 166 years of cpu time when I quit crunching in summer 2012. Never did I say I was running only one system.

You now have more than enough information to figure out who I am on WCG if it matters to you. With that info you can then find me on Boincstats and look at each of the machines I was running.

Again, it would be nice if there was actually some proof of that. Is posting your member name on the grid that complicated? Our member names are public record. Because I still don't believe you -- Anyone arguing that a 4 threaded chip is superior to an 8 threaded one (even acknowledging that IPC is slower) on the grid still defies logic. It just doesn't add up.

BTW, I call major B.S. -- There is only 1 member on World Community Grid with 166 years of processing credit (just looked at All Time member contributions) -- member name is Cpt.Hak and he returned results an hour ago. Quit in 2012? Yeah, now you seem to be digging a deeper hole..... Provide the proof.

Source:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/s...o?sort=points&pageNum=11&numRecordsPerPage=50

It would take a fairly large room of computers to generate those type of numbers you claim. I seriously doubt you own that much processing horsepower.

 

[frozentundra123456]

So if you run 8 projects on a hyperthreaded cpu, do the 4 being run on the physical cores finish before the 4 being run on the hyperthreaded cores? I am not at all familiar with this type of computing. Is it using windows? And why is each project assigned to a specific core?

 

[Enigmoid]

Don't go off-topic... :awe:

It was about FX 8350 vs Xeon 5650 on stock clocks and Xeon 5650 would lose in majority of benchmarks and specially in case you want to play games on it. StarCraft 2 would ran 30% faster on FX 8350 than Xeon 5650 which was being discussed.

Anyway you can only buy used i7 990X by now and you'd be lucky if you could buy unused one or even a retailer that still sells it so you can also have a warranty for it. :hmm:

Nope, OC is perfectly on topic. OC 5650 was recommended and I quoted the person comparing 4.35 ghz 5650 vs. 5.4 ghz FX. 5650 was recommended precisely because with an overclock its so fast.

Anandtech doesn't have the 5650, I am using the 990x so simulate 6 westmere cores at ~3.4 ghz.

 

[Phynaz]

Again, it would be nice if there was actually some proof of that. Is posting your member name on the grid that complicated? Our member names are public record. Because I still don't believe you -- Anyone arguing that a 4 threaded chip is superior to an 8 threaded one (even acknowledging that IPC is slower) on the grid still defies logic. It just doesn't add up.

BTW, I call major B.S. -- There is only 1 member on World Community Grid with 166 years of processing credit (just looked at All Time member contributions) -- member name is Cpt.Hak and he returned results an hour ago. Quit in 2012? Yeah, now you seem to be digging a deeper hole..... Provide the proof.

Source:
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/s...o?sort=points&pageNum=11&numRecordsPerPage=50

It would take a fairly large room of computers to generate those type of numbers you claim. I seriously doubt you own that much processing horsepower.

What are you talking about? There's people on WCG that have over 600 years of CPU time. I know you're a newbie to WCG, but some of us spent many years crunching. I was crunching for years before they used BOINC.

Oh, and you have no clue how much processing power I have access to.

Now that you have managed to completely derail this thread I will not reply to you any further.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I suspect your team has more than 2 people on it.

Now prove what your saying is true. Because I'm pretty confident you are being dishonest. Specifically, please link your individual member page with 175 Million points..... I'm waiting. You can just PM if you don't want it public. I'll happily PM you mine. But seriously, I call BS. Unless you've got a Cray supercomputer in your bedroom. Simply put -- a current top notch desktop PC (like a Haswell) running 24 hours a day would need around 16 years to generate 175 million points.

TBH, I was thinking the same thing. I've got 1.9mil points in WCG, and I've only been crunching it for, like 3-4 years, with various PCs. Not too many. Unless he works at a supercomputer lab, and was using WCG to "burn-in" a new supercomputer, with his personal WCG account, I find his numbers slightly far-fetched.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I know you're a newbie to WCG, but some of us spent many years crunching. I was crunching for years before they used BOINC.

That's interesting. I didn't know that WCG existed before BOINC. I thought that it started because of BOINC.

I'm not a noob to DC either, I started with distributed.net's RC4-56 challenge, with (IIRC) a Pentium MMX 166 @ 233. At least, I think that they were able to leverage MMX back then somehow. Memory of those days is a little hazy.

I also used to run SeventeenOrBust for a long, long time, using their dedicated client.

I also ran Prime95 for a while too.

My participation in WCG is more rather recent, however.