SOLVED Overclocking FX-4300 Specifically

[Holymartyr]

Well I have 2 other computers in the house with Mobos that can handle the FX-4300. The people who use them do not overclock, nor use such intensive programs (gaming wise, rendering wise etc...) that I do.

My question is if I were to get a 6300/8350, how much performance gain am I liable to see?

I thought games still only use 4 cores properly, and any more cores beyond that won't help the performance of games.

And that the faster the CPU, the better.

Yet Intel is somehow producing CPU's with less cores, less speed, but do better than AMD gaming wise.

I don't understand that at all besides maybe Intel has better instructions for the CPU than AMD does atm or something like that.

Mind if I get some clarification - really kinda confused atm.

Edit: The biggest reason for updating my CPU is I feel that it may be the bottleneck in my system atm. In certain games such as Far Cry 3, Skyrim and Assassins Creed 3 I'll get below 60 FPS without my GPU OR CPU being maxxed out.

 

[Knufire]

You're missing the final part to the equation, IPC (instructions per clock).

(More detailed explication will be edited it when I get on a computer)

 

[ssjwizard]

Intel's latest architectures are quite a bit more efficient than AMDs designs ATM. CPU speed is measured in Mhz but that is only useful to compare within a single architecture. The other factor that has to be considered is "Instructions Per Clock" or IPC. Basically your CPU does more than one thing during each clock cycle. Right now Intel CPUs are doing more things during a single clock cycle and are therefore faster at lower speeds.

Going up to a 6300 might help in some newer games, and if you multi task you will see some gains there aswell. The biggest advantage is the gain of an entire FPU(floating point unit, aka the bit that does decimal numbers). So if the threads are spread across 3 modules instead of 2 the performance will be higher even at a thread count of 4.

 

[Holymartyr]

Ok - few questions:

#1: Where do I find a "list" (if there is one) of how many IPC a CPU has?
#2: I do multitask, I always have uTorrent open, along with an IRC program and a few other background programs, and I do game more often than not with Google Chrome and iTunes open in the background. When my games are extremely demanding (Such as the games I mentioned earlier, I do exit everything out) - So do you have an idea by any chance on how much performance I'll get gaming wise?

AKA Is it worth the price to buy a 6300 or 8350 for the performance gain I'll get. Will it be noticeable and reduce or get rid of my bottleneck on my GTX 670 (overclocked) do you think?

 

[ssjwizard]

I wouldn't expect it to improve gaming FPS in anything but a handful of the newest games. The extra cores would enable you to keep all of your other tasks running while you game. How much that is worth? Only you can decide that one. In all honesty your current chip shouldn't be causing a bottleneck for a single 670 so FPS gain from that angle is little to none.

Theoretically a 6300 is binned higher than a 4300 so it might overclock better, but thats a total shot in the dark. Theres every possibility you would get another non stellar overclocker, of course the odds of getting a spectacular overclocker are about equal.

Theres every possibility that over time with mild tweaking here and there you might learn something about the behaviors of your particular chip and manage to tune it up higher, cooler, or other optimizations later on, so it could be beneficial to hang on to it for a while longer.

 

[Holymartyr]

Well then I guess I consider this thread solved. Thanks for all the help.