CPU Upgrading help: AMD A10 7860K or FX 6300?

[byron182]

Hey guys. It's been a long time since I posted and I got a question. My athlon II X4 just isn't cutting it anymore when playing games. I just bought the Fallout 4 game and I want to play it at a decent fps. Is it worth it to buy a new motherboard with the A10? or just stick with the FX series. Although I'm not sure my PSU can handle it.

 

[Tír na nÓg]

Your PSU will handle it according to various reviews.

Get a 212 together with the 6300, you should get 4.5GHz easy (you mobo is good enough).

That would be a very decent upgrade for little money.

If you have some spare cash, sell the 750 and grab a 1060 or a RX 480.

You will play all moder AA titles@60FPS/1080p, and have some horsepower left for some future proofing.

 

[byron182]

Yeah. The iGPU seems redundant now that I think about it. So changing to Aseries/FM2 CPUs are like basically a downgrade right? Although the AM3/AM3+ upgrade route seems stagnant to me.

 

[PetrolHead]

If you have some spare cash, sell the 750 and grab a 1060 or a RX 480.

You will play all moder AA titles@60FPS/1080p, and have some horsepower left for some future proofing.

Not with everything maxed out. That FX-6300 will bottleneck both GPUs and 60 fps/1080p will require lowering the detail level in many modern AA titles. In Fallout 4 you need more than an FX-8350 and RX 480 to achieve a steady 60 FPS @ 1080p Ultra:

byron182: Your GPU is a big bottleneck at the moment. Neither CPU will get you what you want if you keep that GPU. Furthermore, I suspect you'll be better off upgrading your GPU and keeping your CPU than the other way around. Upgrading to an A10 when you have a discrete graphics card doesn't really make much sense, and it's also a bit slower than the FX-6300. Neither the FX-6300 or the A10 are very future proof, so unless you're able to obtain the parts really cheap, I'd suggest waiting until AMD releases Zen. You could try upgrading just your GPU to something like the GTX 1060 Tír na nÓg suggested (since you only have a 500 W PSU and the AIB versions of RX 480 may require more) and see if it improves the situation enough for Fallout 4 to be playable.

 

[Tír na nÓg]

^I trust more this than some dodgy youtube review
http://www.techspot.com/review/1089-fallout-4-benchmarks/page5.html

But I agree 100% with you: GPU is the bottleneck. A good CPU refresh would not hurt though!

Edit: a 500W PSU is plenty for an overclocked 480 and 6300. I used to run a 7970@1250MHz coupled with a X6 1090T@4GHz on a BeQuiet 500W. And it is maybe 150 mor watts than a 480 and a 6300 both highly OC'ed. The 480 would need to be 6+8pins (75w+150w+75w) to "kill" the 500W PSU.

 

[PetrolHead]

^I trust more this than some dodgy youtube review
http://www.techspot.com/review/1089-fallout-4-benchmarks/page5.html

You did notice they used a 980 Ti, which will yield better FPS than the RX 480 as long as the CPU bottleneck is not 100%? I think I posted this in some other thread already, but here you can see how an OC'd FX-6300 bottlenecks an RX 480 compared to an OC'd i7-6700K:

Even though the FX-6300 keeps both the RX 480 and 980 Ti from achieving their full potential, the 980 Ti can still give significantly better FPS than the RX 480 when paired with the FX-6300.

Edit: a 500W PSU is plenty for an overclocked 480 and 6300. I used to run a 7970@1250MHz coupled with a X6 1090T@4GHz on a BeQuiet 500W. And it is maybe 150 mor watts than a 480 and a 6300 both highly OC'ed. The 480 would need to be 6+8pins (75w+150w+75w) to "kill" the 500W PSU.

At least Sapphire states that the recommended minimum power output is 500W for the reference models. AIB models will likely have even higher recommendations due to overclocking and the fact that the stock reference model draws 164 W according to Tom's Hardware. Of course there will be some headroom in those recommendations, so one might easily get away with an even smaller PSU, depending on the rest of the parts.

 

[Tír na nÓg]

You did notice they used a 980 Ti, which will yield better FPS than the RX 480 as long as the CPU bottleneck is not 100%? I think I posted this in some other thread already, but here you can see how an OC'd FX-6300 bottlenecks an RX 480 compared to an OC'd i7-6700K:

Even though the FX-6300 keeps both the RX 480 and 980 Ti from achieving their full potential, the 980 Ti can still give significantly better FPS than the RX 480 when paired with the FX-6300.



At least Sapphire states that the recommended minimum power output is 500W for the reference models. AIB models will likely have even higher recommendations due to overclocking and the fact that the stock reference model draws 164 W according to Tom's Hardware. Of course there will be some headroom in those recommendations, so one might easily get away with an even smaller PSU, depending on the rest of the parts.

The 6300 is running at stock, talking of a 4.5GHz overclock (standard with an UD3 and a 212).

manufacturers recommandations are BS... Same as so called watt PSU calculators.

Edit: sorry, did not see the OC part. I think it is BS...

Of course, for the OP, best would be to go with a 6700k and a 1080, but it is around $700 more than upgrading to a 6300 and a 480...

Sure, Intel is faster than AMD (see sig ), but would you see the difference between 80FPS and 200FPS on a 60Hz display?

Edit 2: this revie iS big time BS. How can you explain (5:30), that a 6300+480 gives 62 FPS avge vs 87FPS for the 6700k+480 (35%+ difference) when the 6300+980ti gives 96FPS and the 6700k+980ti "only" 104 (+10%) when the CPU is the bottleneck...

 

[ShrimpBrime]

Budget?

 

[Tír na nÓg]

^that's the best question to date

 

[byron182]

budget? hmm. maybe 100-140 bucks for the cpu. I going to upgrade my GPU when I get some extra cash. Btw. I'm not in the US, so prices are different here. I can get the FX-6300 for 115$. Intel prices? forget about it.. too expensive. FYI I had my Athlon II 630 OC 3.3ghz + HD5970 on a CoolerMaster 500 PSU before. It ran for 3 years with no problems.

Edit: I was reading the new AMD Zen and I'm so excited I'll probably wait for it instead.

 

[PetrolHead]

Edit 2: this revie iS big time BS. How can you explain (5:30), that a 6300+480 gives 62 FPS avge vs 87FPS for the 6700k+480 (35%+ difference) when the 6300+980ti gives 96FPS and the 6700k+980ti "only" 104 (+10%) when the CPU is the bottleneck...

AMD's cards do really well in Hitman DX12 (it's AMD optimized), with the RX 480 matching the 980 Ti (@1080p) at least in this review:

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/amd_radeon_r9_rx_480_8gb_review,11.html

It's a good question why the FX-6300 seems to hold the RX 480 back more than the 980 Ti. I don't have an easy answer to that, but it doesn't change the fact that the FX-6300 is holding both GPUs back. In general, benchmarking games over different systems isn't an exact science, since different games use system resources differently. Settings also have a big impact to the relative performance between AMD and NVidia, since both have slightly different advantages. This is why you can't use just one game to determine the performance of a GPU or draw conclusions on where the bottlenecks are. You have to look at trends over several games and realize that there may well be cases where everything is turned upside down.

 

[Kenrou]

It's a good question why the FX-6300 seems to hold the RX 480 back more than the 980 Ti.

1x 980ti/1070 ~/= 2x 480 in raw performance. Very bad game optimization and the 6300 is bottlenecking the 980ti.

 

[Tír na nÓg]

budget? hmm. maybe 100-140 bucks for the cpu. I going to upgrade my GPU when I get some extra cash. Btw. I'm not in the US, so prices are different here. I can get the FX-6300 for 115$. Intel prices? forget about it.. too expensive. FYI I had my Athlon II 630 OC 3.3ghz + HD5970 on a CoolerMaster 500 PSU before. It ran for 3 years with no problems.

Edit: I was reading the new AMD Zen and I'm so excited I'll probably wait for it instead.

Are you in Europe? If so, have a look at overclockers.co.uk . Weak pound=great prices in euro! They deliver across all Europe I believe.

- - - Updated - - -

1x 980ti/1070 ~/= 2x 480 in raw performance. Very bad game optimization and the 6300 is bottlenecking the 980ti.

YEs, but it's bottlenecking the 480 more while it should be the other way around !

Doesn't make sense...

 

[Kenrou]

YEs, but it's bottlenecking the 480 more while it should be the other way around !

Doesn't make sense...

Very bad game optimization

 

[byron182]

I'm from the Philippines, so the selections are a bit limited. I could buy a decent GPU first but I'm not sure my Athlon can play Fallout 4. The intel cpu that I can afford is the i5 4460 3.2ghz or i5 6400 2.7ghz. I'm not sure if it's worth it if I also get a dedicated Gpu

 

[Tír na nÓg]

Look at the CPU charts:
http://www.techspot.com/review/1089-fallout-4-benchmarks/page5.html

 

[byron182]

Look at the CPU charts:
http://www.techspot.com/review/1089-fallout-4-benchmarks/page5.html

Sigh..AMD... that's just depressing. Although it's on Ultra 1080p, my monitor is only 900p. I don't know if that make a difference.

 

[Tír na nÓg]

YEs, it does: 25% less pixel to render=roughly 25% more performance!

 

[byron182]

hmm..possibly.. but seeing the FX-9590 being clobbered by the i3 makes me want to consider getting an intel. The low tdp is also a consideration if I want to upgrade to a more power hungry GPU. The Intel i3 6100 is kinda on my budget sweet spot too. Question: Do cores really matter that much considering the i3 is "just" a dual core? or is more on the Ghz, threads?

BTW I just want to play Fallout 4, Skyrim with mods.

 

[PetrolHead]

hmm..possibly.. but seeing the FX-9590 being clobbered by the i3 makes me want to consider getting an intel. The low tdp is also a consideration if I want to upgrade to a more power hungry GPU. The Intel i3 6100 is kinda on my budget sweet spot too. Question: Do cores really matter that much considering the i3 is "just" a dual core? or is more on the Ghz, threads?

BTW I just want to play Fallout 4, Skyrim with mods.

It depends on the game. Some games can utilize several cores and threads well, other rely mostly on single thread performance. I don't know how Skyrim's mods affect performance, but Skyrim itself doesn't really take advantage of more than four cores and should run pretty well on just two cores (as long as single thread performance is decent):

http://www.techspot.com/review/467-...rim-performance-benchmark,review-32318-9.html
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/skyrim-performance-benchmark,review-32318-9.html

The single thread performance of that i3 seems to be better than that of an FX-6300 and an FX-9590, which probably explains the Fallout 4 results and means that it isn't really optimised for several cores and threads either:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i3-6100+@+3.70GHz
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+FX-6300+Six-Core&id=1781
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+FX-9590+Eight-Core

So, for those two games the i3 seems to be an okay choice.