The FX line and it's top FX cpu - the one in my sig there - is hot. Lets say it renders better than a 3770K but not as well as a 4770K and certainly not a 4790K. Having said that, AMD has no future plans (at least for told that any knows about) for making future FX line or aggressive desktop Cpu if you will.
AMD games well. But see it's hard to explain.....
So you buy an FX-8320 for example. Well, now you want to overclock it. Uhg the heat. 1.4v ish. Is handled by most decent liquid cooling in a normal environment. But see you void warranty, not that it ever matters, and you create un-needed heat, Thus looking at intel, you get the same gaming effect on a lower end stock non K model quad as an overclocked 8 core AMD.
Then you look at what games (most of them) are optimized on. It's Intel. Made on an Intel machine. And generally runs and plays smoother on Intel. This is a disadvantage.
OK, so even with FX-4300 vs Phenom II 965BE. OK on a lot of titles, I found these two cpu's game very similar. The difference was clock speed. tested 3.8ghz vs 4.8ghz FX favor. No major increase or decrease within a marginal error.
History, making a complete quad to a complete 8 core cpu was interesting. All because of a design that was tried many years ago with much fail. It should be written in the books that this was at least some sort of accomplishment. 8 cores shared cache, modules, pipelines, all that fun stuff. Integrated a better newer HT circuit. But as it sits, the X86 core itself is still unchanged. It shrinks, makes room for more transistors or more hardware such as x86 and ARM hybrids (future desktop??) and x86 with iGPU that actually is good for streaming and light to med gaming. A decent core for winrar I might add. fast.
But if you want AMD, it's gotta be for more than just gaming. You'll find a lot of their newer APUs game pretty well with a hefty VGA card too. After all, it's still the same x86 core doing the work.
You wanna know something though. I ran a 980BE in the M5A board for some months. Nice big 850psu. GTX 480. Liquid cooled the whole darn thing..... exceptional gaming experiences.
