Which CPU for an MSI Radeon R9 290?

[Jacky60]

4670K is the best for buck without HT right now. Don't mess about with a 2500k if you can get 4670k and if you can afford 4770k get that. CPUs as Blasting says are a pain to upgrade so the fastest you can reasonably afford is a good rule. 2500k was great 2 years ago but things move fast here.

 

[cRYSTALWIRE]

Well, I am currently in the process of putting a list together with prices. Motherboards are taking up a bit of time at the moment. So many different types. Even from the one manufacturer. Then onto finding compatible ram for the mobo I choose.

 

[tweakboy]

Couple it with AMD... since your AMD on your 500 dollar l thx gl

 

[blackened23]

Stop spreading FUD. OP only mentioned playing Amnesia and Corsa racing.

Oh please. The only one spreading FUD is you. Trying to suggest that the Kaveri will come close to the gaming experience of a Haswell. You also cherry picked the absolute most GPU limited situations you could find as well. Across all games, the APU won't come close to a 46 or 4770k.

But please tell us that the Kaveri will magically double the performance of the 6800k. Like I said. APUs are fine for HTPCs and light gaming. Anyone using it for a powerhouse gaming system is on serious drugs, because the 4670k is fairly cheap and soundly beats any APU you can buy in terms of IPC and multi threaded performance. And its reasonable to expect anyone buying a premium GPU will also want a premium gaming system. Which an APU will not be. Seriously, who buys a 500$ GPU and pairs it with a low end CPU? Give me a break.

APUs have their place, don't get me wrong - they're great for specific uses. That being HTPC and light use systems. However, it isn't reasonable to pair a top of the line GPU with a CPU that is severely mismatched. The 4770k has superior MT and IPC performance. And the APU stumbles, severely, in that respect.

 

[xSneak]

Oh please. The only one spreading FUD is you. Trying to suggest that the Kaveri will come close to the gaming experience of a Haswell. You also cherry picked the absolute most GPU limited situations you could find as well. Across all games, the APU won't come close to a 46 or 4770k.

But please tell us that the Kaveri will magically double the performance of the 6800k. Like I said. APUs are fine for HTPCs and light gaming. Anyone using it for a powerhouse gaming system is on serious drugs, because the 4670k is fairly cheap and soundly beats any APU you can buy in terms of IPC and multi threaded performance. And its reasonable to expect anyone buying a premium GPU will also want a premium gaming system. Which an APU will not be. Seriously, who buys a 500$ GPU and pairs it with a low end CPU? Give me a break.

APUs have their place, don't get me wrong - they're great for specific uses. That being HTPC and light use systems. However, it isn't reasonable to pair a top of the line GPU with a CPU that is severely mismatched. The 4770k has superior MT and IPC performance. And the APU stumbles, severely, in that respect.

I'm not trying to derail your thread OP, but I have to reply.

I only claimed it would deliver around 60 fps in modern games, which your graphs show adequately. It looks like intel would have the advantage for using a 120hz monitor playing far cry 2. I don't know how many people would use that as a major criteria in putting together a rig.

Furthermore, op hasn't even bought parts yet and I doubt is getting a 290 for 1080p. He mentioned he's on a budget so I'm trying to help him save some money. He never mentioned 1440p, 120hz, or single threaded games so i think kaveri would be a good option at that price point.

 

[frozentundra123456]

I'm not trying to derail your thread OP, but I have to reply.

I only claimed it would deliver around 60 fps in modern games, which your graphs show adequately. It looks like intel would have the advantage for using a 120hz monitor playing far cry 2. I don't know how many people would use that as a major criteria in putting together a rig.

Furthermore, op hasn't even bought parts yet and I doubt is getting a 290 for 1080p. He mentioned he's on a budget so I'm trying to help him save some money. He never mentioned 1440p, 120hz, or single threaded games so i think kaveri would be a good option at that price point.

Ummmm.... did you read the title of the thread?

 

[xSneak]

Ummmm.... did you read the title of the thread?

Did you read the actual post?

 

[cRYSTALWIRE]

All good guys.
I am just working on which mobo currently. Trying to find more than enough time learning about them and working out which will fit the bill. Bloody complicated things really :biggrin: I forsee more hours ahead of reading to do...so with that said..back to it..

 

[wand3r3r]

Unfortunately your thread got a bit derailed.

If you are going for the 4670k or 4770k and are looking at motherboards, there are some decent boards for reasonable prices. One bigger thing is whether you will go multi-gpu in the future. If so you need two PCI-Express slots with either x4 or x8 and one will likely be x16. Most boards with two PCI 4x/8x/16 slots have crossfire support, but not all have SLI support since it costs the board manufacturer royalties to NV. So that's one important feature to consider (enough slots if you go multi gpu and either crossfire/sli support or both).

Other things to consider:
# of USB3 ports
# of SATA3 ports

I'd guess that once you find a couple options, or a budget the guys here can point you to the best options(s) at that point. Personally I wouldn't go for the highest Z87 boards unless you want 3x video cards and at some point it would be wiser to go X79 with the highest end setups but that doesn't really apply to you.

A couple random boards/series:
MSI Z87 Gaming
Gigabyte Z87 UDxH
ASRock Z87 (extreme models?)


The one thing I missed or you didn't mention is your case. If you go with a custom R9 290 (at retail the best bang/buck in the high end as I believe the prices are in Australia) you need a case with decent airflow.

 

[Spawne32]

Oh please. The only one spreading FUD is you. Trying to suggest that the Kaveri will come close to the gaming experience of a Haswell. You also cherry picked the absolute most GPU limited situations you could find as well. Across all games, the APU won't come close to a 46 or 4770k.

But please tell us that the Kaveri will magically double the performance of the 6800k. Like I said. APUs are fine for HTPCs and light gaming. Anyone using it for a powerhouse gaming system is on serious drugs, because the 4670k is fairly cheap and soundly beats any APU you can buy in terms of IPC and multi threaded performance. And its reasonable to expect anyone buying a premium GPU will also want a premium gaming system. Which an APU will not be. Seriously, who buys a 500$ GPU and pairs it with a low end CPU? Give me a break.

APUs have their place, don't get me wrong - they're great for specific uses. That being HTPC and light use systems. However, it isn't reasonable to pair a top of the line GPU with a CPU that is severely mismatched. The 4770k has superior MT and IPC performance. And the APU stumbles, severely, in that respect.

No one is claiming that kaveri will magically double the performance of a 6800k, but a 15-30% improvement all around would be a significant improvement considering its price and its placement. Look at where the 8320 8 core FX falls on that vantage score chart compared to the 6800k. People building a budget gaming pc looking for a processor between 100-150 would probably still be better off with kaveri over intel at that price range. When you consider the i5 barely gets to 175 bucks in its lowest form.

 

[blackened23]

Kaveri isn't a 15-30% improvement. It's a 10% improvement with 10% worse clockspeeds. And Kaveri over a core i5 for gaming? You get what you pay for when it comes to a gaming PC. A core i5 is significantly better than the Kaveri or any APU, so essentially a Kaveri is going to be cheap and that's about it. You get what you pay for when it comes to PCs, especially high end gaming PCs. Period. And this is aside from the fact that the OP has a top of the line 500$ GPU. Pairing a top of the line GPU with the cheapest low end CPU possible? How the hell does that even make sense? I'd say it makes far more sense to get the core i5 for 30-40 more bucks and have a much more robust and better performing gaming experience. As I said. When it comes to gaming PCs that you assemble yourself, you get what you pay for. If you go cheap, the performance will be cheap. But here we have a guy that clearly isnt' going cheap since he has a 500$ GPU. How is a cheap CPU reasonable to pair with it? It isn't. It would be outright stupid. If the OP wanted cheap junk, he could have bought a 100-150$ GPU and bought an APU to pair with it. But that isn't what happened. He bought a high end GPU. So it makes sense to get a good high end core CPU to pair with it.

I think Kaveri will maintain the niche that most APUs have now. A good HTPC chip that is cost effective. This isn't a part that you suggest to someone who wants a high end gaming PC.

 

[Spawne32]

Kaveri isn't a 15-30% improvement. It's a 10% improvement with 10% worse clockspeeds.

Kaveri isn't all too great on the desktop, and it is going to severely miss the target for the market that matters the most: mobile. If a desktop LGA CPU performs as the Kaveri leaks indicate, that has very bad ramifications for the upcoming mobile Kaveri based parts.

There hasn't been a single reputable review yet to base that fact on, and every review released so far has shown that there will be at least 10% of an improvement thus far. I'd wait until the 14th until you start making judgements like everyone is making that AMD is going out of business. I remember the same claims 10 years ago right before AMD dropped a bomb on intel.

 

[blackened23]

Nobody stated that AMD would go out of business. What is being stated is that Kaveri will be inferior to a core i5 for a high end gaming PC.

Kaveri could be 10%-15% better than the 6800k in terms of IPC. That is still significantly worse than any core i5/i7 product. Like I said, Kaveri will maintain the current APU niche of being a decent HTPC chip. Nothing more , nothing less. Certainly not fit for a high end gaming PC, especially one that has one of the fastest GPUs you can buy.

An FX CPU could be a decent alternative given a lower price, despite the fact that core is faster over-all. But an APU? Come on. That's not what you use for high end gaming. I could see the case for an FX CPU for budget gaming - they are cheaper than core products overall, and while they won't perform on the same level, they're definitely faster than any APU for PC gaming. APU has a niche that is something different entirely, and it isn't a high end gaming rig.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Exactly. I dont understand all the people who are saying "wait for Kaveri" when discussing a mid to high end build with a powerful discrete gpu. There is little chance it will match an i5, and for cheaper price points, as you said, AMD's own FX line offers better performance than anything that can be reasonably expected from Kaveri.

I see Kaveri as you said, still fitting into the same niche market than AMD's APUs currently fill: HTPC and SFF where you do not want to add a discrete card, and best case for AMD, a low/mid range gaming rig if they can work out the bugs in asymmetric crossfire so that you can get good scaling without stutter with Kaveri and a lower end discrete card.

Edit: I will say we should wait for full test results from independent sources. However, none of the early leaks have looked particularly good, and recently, with BD and Haswell for instance, everytime we have said the actual results must be better than the early leaks, it pretty much has been in line with the leaks.

 

[blackened23]

On that topic, asymmetric crossfire will always have stutter. When you pair two unevenly performing graphics solution that is always the result. There is no way to prevent it. In fact, tomshardware tested asymmetric crossfire with an APU + dGPU and the microstutter was so hilariously awful that it was unusable.

But, yeah. The bottom line is suggesting an APU for a high end gaming build is pure insanity. An FX CPU is better even though it is worse than any core i5 or core i7 - I could almost even respect a recommendation for an FX CPU, because while it doesn't perform on par with core it is still cheaper and could be viable for a budget gaming build. An APU though? Really? Ugh.. Core i5 is the best by a mile for a high end gaming rig. An FX CPU could be viable for a budget gaming rig, although the guy has a R9-290....Where does the APU fit in for high end gaming? It doesn't fit in anywhere. It has a niche and high end gaming rigs aint it.

 

[skipsneeky2]

Hell i think anyone buying a 290 should already have a i5 or better cause a 290 is a serious gamer card which tells me the person is serious about gaming and in this case most serious gamers are rocking a Intel chip.

With the rig in my sig at 1080p,i have found my i5 limits my 770 in some games like GTA4 and WOT which i play both frequently and the only way to eliminate the bottleneck is either grab a highly clocked Haswell build or putting the bottleneck back on my gpu by going with a 1440p panel.

Hell i would think with a 290,there shouldn't even be a question of which chip goes with a current $500 card.

 

[cRYSTALWIRE]

Hi there wand3r3r,

I will not be looking to do any SLI or Crossfire.

I'll need some USB3 ports. You mentioned SATA3 ports? Aren't they all SATA 6 now? Though I do see this in brackets (SATA3 0~5) in the product description.

At the moment I am looking at these boards; Gigabyte Z87-D3HP, Gigabyte Z87 UD3H and the 4H version of the board. And also comparing other boards to these.

Is the speed of RAM so important?
I mean the average board seems to accommodate up to DDR3 1600Mhz Yet there are some boards which support much much higher than this. Though I also noted a higher price demanded for the higher Mhz RAM.

I have also noticed the G1 sniper boards have
-Creative Sound Core 3D chip
-Support for Sound Blaster Recon3Di

While the other manufacturers use
-Realtek ALC892 codec or
-Realtek ALC887 codec

Whats the difference here?

Although I am asking questions about these things I am still doing my own leg work too to try and answer these for myself. There's just so much to take in with the small hours I have to this project.

Thanks all

 

[Headfoot]

All this Kaveri talk is a complete derail. Kaveri has no place in a system running a 290. You would bottleneck that 290 on any moderately CPU heavy game

 

[Headfoot]

Hi there wand3r3r,

I will not be looking to do any SLI or Crossfire.

I'll need some USB3 ports. You mentioned SATA3 ports? Aren't they all SATA 6 now? Though I do see this in brackets (SATA3 0~5) in the product description.

At the moment I am looking at these boards; Gigabyte Z87-D3HP, Gigabyte Z87 UD3H and the 4H version of the board. And also comparing other boards to these.

Is the speed of RAM so important?
I mean the average board seems to accommodate up to DDR3 1600Mhz Yet there are some boards which support much much higher than this. Though I also noted a higher price demanded for the higher Mhz RAM.

I have also noticed the G1 sniper boards have
-Creative Sound Core 3D chip
-Support for Sound Blaster Recon3Di

While the other manufacturers use
-Realtek ALC892 codec or
-Realtek ALC887 codec

Whats the difference here?

Although I am asking questions about these things I am still doing my own leg work too to try and answer these for myself. There's just so much to take in with the small hours I have to this project.

Thanks all

Higher speed ram will help you a very very small amount and only in very RAM intensive things like running the integrated GPU or Winzip. Just get an inexpensive 1600 Mhz 8 or 16 GB kit.

Some of the high end boards from Gigabyte and Asus include better sound chips. Unless you're doing something unusual with your computer in regards to sound it wont be very noticeable. You'd have to be running some pretty nice audio gear to hear a difference. I'd consider it a non-issue, just keep it in mind when looking for drivers for the board if you do eventually get it.

 

[cRYSTALWIRE]

Thanks Headfoot. Appreciate the explanation.

 

[wand3r3r]

Hi there wand3r3r,

I will not be looking to do any SLI or Crossfire.

I'll need some USB3 ports. You mentioned SATA3 ports? Aren't they all SATA 6 now? Though I do see this in brackets (SATA3 0~5) in the product description.

At the moment I am looking at these boards; Gigabyte Z87-D3HP, Gigabyte Z87 UD3H and the 4H version of the board. And also comparing other boards to these.

Is the speed of RAM so important?
I mean the average board seems to accommodate up to DDR3 1600Mhz Yet there are some boards which support much much higher than this. Though I also noted a higher price demanded for the higher Mhz RAM.

I have also noticed the G1 sniper boards have
-Creative Sound Core 3D chip
-Support for Sound Blaster Recon3Di

While the other manufacturers use
-Realtek ALC892 codec or
-Realtek ALC887 codec

Whats the difference here?

Although I am asking questions about these things I am still doing my own leg work too to try and answer these for myself. There's just so much to take in with the small hours I have to this project.

Thanks all

SATA-3 is 6Gb/s which you may be confusing for the generation (3rd gen). The SATA 0-5 are just port numbers on a particular board. Usually you plug your SSD in the port 0.

Gigabyte makes good boards, I had a Z77 Gigabyte and it worked well and had quite a few features. Personally I think 3 boards you mentioned are good mid range boards but I haven't checked the differences between them.

 

[cRYSTALWIRE]

Hi wand3r3r,

I just finished comparing the 4 mother boards.
I have listed the boards in order from the least amount of features to the most.
Noting that the board next in line will have all that the predecessor did. So I've only made note of what was added to the board as it steps up to the next level.
(I think i've got it all in order )

Gigabyte Z87-D3HP $148.00 Aus
-Has Japanese solid Caps, x16/x4/x1 PCIe

Gigabyte Z87 UD3H $200.00 Aus
-Black solid caps (Not Japanese?), 2x copper PCB, ON/OFF USB Charge, Extra heat sink, x16/x8/x4 PCIe, Display Port and a Gaming Headphone Amplifier (Front Headphone)

Gigabyte Z87 UD4H $243.00 Aus
-Added heat pipe,

Gigabyte Z87 UD5H $294.00 Aus
-New Heatsink design with 7 onboard fan connectors, HyperDuo Technology-Automated SSD/HDD Tiering, SLI and CrossFire support, Sound Blaster X-Fi MB3 software suite, Support for X-Fi Xtreme Fidelity® and EAX® Advanced HD™ 5.0 technologies, Two Intel® GbE LAN chips (10/100/1000 Mbit),

The Gigabyte Z87-D3HP looks good enough. But I am not sure if this board can overclock the cpu. I am pretty sure the UD3H can.

Still to see about this.....off now to catch some Zzzzz...sss..

 

[cRYSTALWIRE]

By the way, this thread can be moved to a more appropriate forum if needs be. I have pretty much decided on the cpu now. The rest is just deciding on the components for the build.

Thanks.

 

[wand3r3r]

You can just make a new thread in e.g. the Motherboards section and just leave this one to die off.

The Z87-UD3H has a review there.
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2335033

If the differences between the UD3H and D3HP are only whats listed above the D3HP should be a good board.

 

[el etro]

The cheaper Haswell i5 you can found will be perfect. No need more really.

8350 can be better than i5 some times, but only in a few newer games. I would not pick the 8350 beacuse its 125W TDP.