Thinking about upgrading

I would wait for piledriver.

I'm planning on a cpu upgrade as well just waiting for pd to come out as it looks loads better

Higher base clock, lower power consumption and cooler running.

Also won't cost u over £400 upgrade

I know what you mean as I keep thinking about intel as well.

The tdp has got to be less than bd as they have already said this.

Its ment to be in production now for q4 release to public so 3 / 4 months time.

4Ghz over 8 cores
IPC will far improve over Bulldozer

AMD FX 8350 is an eight-core with 16MB cache, Vishera based 32nm core with 4.0GHz default clock and ability to jump to 4.2GHz with turbo core automatic overclocking.

The FX 6300 is a six-core, basically a faster iteration of the 3.8GHz clocked FX 6200 and it’s turbo will work at more than 4.1GHz. It comes with 14MB cache as the two cores are disabled at this native eight core design and we suspect that this might be the first 4GHz natively six-core ever.

The FX 4320 is a quad-core and again it replaces a Zambezi quad-core called AMD FX 4170 clocked at 4.2GHz native and 4.3GHz with turbo overclocking and it will come with 12MB cache

pinched from xd_1771.

Should overclock to 5ghz the 8350 hopefully

I would just wait for Piledriver Its meant to be a good Improvment over Bulldozer

What RTS games are you playing, and please describe the performance problems you are having in as specific a manner as possible.
Edited by MisterFred - 7/8/12 at 8:56am

Yeah, I thought so. SC2 is notorious for this, especially when running an AMD processor. It's heavily dependent on per-core CPU performance, while AMD tends to specialize in providing more (not as good as Intel) cores for less money. Also, graphics power is next-to-irrelevant for SC2.

The reason this is: the more units on the screen, the higher the pathing & AI calculation requirements. And SC2 is not programmed to be able to use more than 2 cores**. So for best SC2 performance, you want the fastest 2 cores possible. And no AMD processor can provide this. Piledriver won't either. It's a major pain, but there it is.

Skyrim may have a similar problem: its performance demands are far less clear, but during CPU-demanding scenarios it tends to rely on one fast core and a few other mildly-used cores.

Civ 5... actually I have no idea what causes Civ 5 to run well.

At least for SC2, you're not going to see any improved performance without switching to Intel processors (though as you noted, the overclock helps). Piledriver might provide some improvement, but you'll just get the same slowdowns at #s of units 30-50 or so higher. Actually, SC2 can slow down even Intel processors, but there you can usually power through the more demanding situations with playable frame rates, especially if you get an overclockable processor.

**In fact, the 2-core limitation is so strong, my own g850 (stock-speed basic Intel dual-core, not even an i3) actually competes with any other non-overclocked Intel CPU for StarCraft, and probably provides superior or equivalent performance to your overclocked FX-8120! For reference, I can play 1v1, 2v2, and 3v3 smoothly no problem, only suffering occasional mild slowdowns in very late game 4v4 with nearly everyone having maxxed armies, even if I'm zerg going for a high-unit-count zergling/baneling army.