Help with Upgrade.....FX 8350 vs Phenom II 945 - Page 3

He'd be better off getting a 8350, AMD seems to have trouble in BF3 against the GTX 670. Like the first comment in this thread its most likely his gpu that's doing that him.

When was I using prices to go against AMD? I'm stating the obvious that the i5-3570K is $180 at Microcenter right now which is a complete steal, and the gigabyte Z77 UD3H is $95. Unless the OP is sitting down for a nice game of, encoding, decoding, compression, and encryption then I guess its a good investment. With Steamroller supposedly being delayed it seems that AMD is up to their old tricks again like they were with Bulldozer. OP I'm not saying it would be a bad buy to go with a 8350, it would a be a good upgrade over your current processor.

They will both play BF 3 in my opinion ,no matter the number of server players.If you like crowded servers they will work.Maybe the 945 will need some overclocking.I can t feel no difference with my 975 BE when playing on 64 servers or 32 .
On the other hand the Frostbyte 2 top dog is the 8350 -> http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/medal-of-honor-warfighter-performance-benchmark,3336-7.html

Oh and one more thing ,you need 2 Gigs of VRAM on your video card for Ultra details (maximum AA).I see you have a 1 giga one.

Hi Jerm357,

The 8350 in a game like BF3 is not a bad choice. In other games, that are bound to a few threads or less, it's going to be limited to the performance of a sandy bridge pentium, however, that's not actually a BAD place to be performance wise in most of those games (it's "good enough").

The hassle of a platform switch (windows validation?) is probably not worth it unless you play a lot of other games and are desiring better performance in those games. BF3 represents a rare case where the big core count of the AMD approach is beneficial. I'd say that if that is your primary game, you will see a pretty significant jump in performance moving to an 8350 and can probably live with the less than spectacular per core performance. (you won't be gaining much per-core performance, but you will be gaining a reasonable amount of parallel performance)

Normally I don't suggest top tier CPUs because they are not typically cost effective, however, on this round, the premium for the 8350 (a guaranteed 4GHZ base clock inside of a 125W envelope) may be worth the premium over the 8320. In my eyes, that has "easy" 4.5GHZ written all over it, and 5GHZ capable in a decent setup almost guaranteed.

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Comparing the per-core performance of Vishera to deneb is tricky. Keep in mind, that deneb has very linear scaling from core to core. Each core is always operated at the same frequency, and there are far less shared resources in a Deneb chip. Performance scaling on a deneb chip as loads become more parallel is pretty straight forward. The integer or FPU performance of a single operation will scale up as it is paralleled out to utilize the remaining cores in a very linear fashion. On the other hand, in AMDs new architecture, you have both turbo-core and shared resource "modules." The result is that, as the level of of parallelism increases, the per-core performance drops off as both the turbo-core frequencies are scaled back, and the shared resources become a bottleneck. In other-words, the "per-core" performance as compared to deneb varies depending on load. In lightly threaded tasks, vishera is typically better. In highly parallel workloads, the per-core performance of Vishera is often worse than Deneb, however, the higher "core" count will can overcome this on the 6-8 core variants. The latest vishera 6 core units, are basically on-par (trading blows) with the turbo-cored 6 core thuban (phenom II) chips that were popular a year or so ago.

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Are you planning to overclock?

Regards,
Eric

If i were in your position, i would overclock that phenom 945 to 3.8 ghz.

1. If you cant reach 3.8ghz, sell the phenom and go for the FX8350 since it already beats the phenom at stock clockspeed.

2. If you manage to reach 3.8ghz, sell the 6950 and add the $200 to get an HD7950

I just went through almost exactly the same situation as you, except that I had an older socket AM2+ motherboard with DDR2 memory and a core-unlocked Phenom II X2 550BE that had 4 good cores and clocked to 3.8GHz. I decided to spring for a new AM3+ motherboard, DDR3 ram and an FX-8350 and I've just built the new system. Still feeling my way around with it. Unfortunately, I haven't got B3 re-installed yet, but I believe the above is the best advice so far, although the FX-8350 will give you a boost in Battlefield 3, especially with that 7950. If you buy a 7950, I highly recommend the Gigabyte Windforce 3 version. If you can't get a Windforce 3, at least get one with a good custom cooler (Asus, Sapphire, HIS non-reference) with a dual bios. I flashed the bios on my Gigabyte 7950 with a 7970 bios, and it now runs at 1000MHz core/1375MHz memory without any overclocking software.
Edited by anubis44 - 11/28/12 at 10:50pm

See: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-8350-vishera-review,3328-13.html

You probably need a GPU upgrade first and foremost.

Also, lets try not to derail this thread. This isn't the Intel vs AMD flame war section, this is the AMD section.