Upgrading to piledriver for christmas

[Bradtech519]

Been busy and put off the upgrade to see what piledriver brought. Wife told me to get myself something since I am stingy on buying myself goodies through the year. Glad to see Piledriver come finally. It wasn't ground breaking but offers a better deal than bulldozer with improvements on power consumption, but nothing to rival Intel. I am still considering an I5 in the 189.99 price range and weighting my options on nvidia cards for SETI and other projects. I am mainly interesting physics, Astronomy, and ET life. So far I am looking into getting an FX 8350 for 189.99 off prime or the FX 8320. Along with a 970x or 990x AMD board for around $100-120. I got 4GB of DDR3 1600 but probably will go up to 8GB or 16GB. I think I'll keep my 5850 with Zalman. I can't get much out of it compared to the performance gains I'll get replacing it. Seems like I'll need at least a 7950 to see much improvement. The thing runs around 40c idle and still puts out enough for milkyway, but I have nothing for Seti@Home last I checked. Anyone had any crunching experiences with piledriver compared to the I5s or old Thubans or Bulldozers?

 

[sangyup81]

It crunches differently than other processors favoring WUs that are integer heavy. For the vast majority of projects, you can expect calculations to be more FPU heavy. I own a Piledriver and I wish I went with Intel now

 

[Bradtech519]

Is this something they changed when they went with the new architecture with Bulldozer? AMD seems to be have been on a losing steak with this new design. I am looking more into Intel for sure. For folding purposes I want to spend the extra 100 and get the I7. I'm also looking into some I7 920/930s on ebay which are cheap now and better than my 965 BE.

It crunches differently than other processors favoring WUs that are integer heavy. For the vast majority of projects, you can expect calculations to be more FPU heavy. I own a Piledriver and I wish I went with Intel now

 

[Sunny129]

it depends on how you plan on allocating CPU and GPU resources across various projects. if you intend of doing some serious crunching on the CPU, then you'll probably get better FPU performance out of a newer intel chip than you will out of an AMD Piledriver chip. i myself tend to focus mainly on GPU crunching, so CPU performance, while important, is not critical. i just needs more cores to feed more GPUs, so an 8-core Piledriver would give me 2 more cores than i have now to feed my GPUs. if i were focusing mainly on CPU crunching though, i'd seriously consider an intel chip.

as for your 5850, you definitely don't need to step all the way up to a 7950 to see much improvement. you could save yourself $80 or more if you go w/ a used 6950 for around the $150 mark, and even though it trails the 7950 in performance, it doesn't really consume any more power under load...so the cost of ownership after the initial investment is wash. in Milkyway@Home, i used to net ~250K PPD on my stock clocked XFX HD 6950, and ~270K PPD on my Sapphire Toxic HD 6950 (which has a stock OC matching reference 6970 clocks). now i'm running MW@H on a Sapphire HD 7950 and getting around 320K PPD.

 

[PCTC2]

I have 2 A10-5800K chips laying around... hmmm...