since your wanting SLI later own I suggest you buy a 750 watt psu such as THIS .

 

If you're leaning against overclocking, the E3-1230V3 on an entry level SLI capable Z87 board like the Extreme3 would offer better gaming performance while dissipating far less power. Cost to implement would be about the same, possibly even less when you consider PSU sizing, which can be about 100-200W smaller than an 8-core piledriver rig depending on whether or not it is overclocked.

 

Get a FX 8320 for $140 at Amazon
Get a 990FXA-UD3H for $110
Get a Hyper 212+ EVO for $30

Overclock the 8320 to 4.5ghz + and you beat the un overclockable intel for $270 and have more cores for streaming and multitasking

 

The E3-1230V3 cost around £185, that £45 more then a 8350. He could use that money to invest in to a better GPU.

Believe it or not before my 4770k I used to have a phenom ll x4 955 BE. Trust me IT PLAYED ALL GAMES with a 7970 perfectly fine. Yes the 7970 can perform better with a 3570K but honestly all you need is a 6300/8320/i5 to game with.

as @CravinR1 mentioned
Quote:

Get a FX 8320 for $140 at Amazon
Get a 990FXA-UD3H for $110
Get a Hyper 212+ EVO for $30

This seems pretty good.

 

Why dont you plan on overclocking if you dont mind me asking? the cpu comes unlocked so that a major selling point of the FX processor is its overclocking ability.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by AnnoyinDemon

Before we start building you anything what kind of games do you play? What is your budget? Have you already got/ordered the parts? What resolution?

I really dont play many games now since my machine is really outdated. Id like to get back on eve, maybe some of the newer shooters. Budget is about a grand with a little overflow. I do game dev and would like a machine that can handle some high poly 3d modeling, texturing and rendering hence the 4gb video card and 8 core processor. resolution? 1080p? is that the standard now? I dont think i need 4k.

I would like the possibility of running 3 or more monitors.

 

I would recommend a better board than the UD3, especially if you want to SLI or crossfire. The only AMD board that I know of that supports PCI-e 3.0 is the Sabertooth Gen3, which will also give you lots of headroom for overclocking, I've heard that the UD3s aren't always rock solid, decent board but some people have had problems with them.

 

Try not to get too hung up the hype of having a lot of cores. The quad-"core" hyper-threaded (8 threaded) Haswell E3/i7 will out-perform the 4 "module" (8 core/thread) AMD chips in most real world workloads unless the FX is overclocked.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ultra-m-a-n

Why dont you plan on overclocking if you dont mind me asking? the cpu comes unlocked so that a major selling point of the FX processor is its overclocking ability.

Not something ive ever gotten into. Maybe down the road but its not a goal. Ive got many other things both hardware and software wise id rather focus on that require a working machine.
Quote:

Originally Posted by Wirerat

with that budget you can get a 4770k.

The FX-8350 provides more cores and better multithreaded processing for modeling and rendering. Id also rather spend the money on other hardware like an extra monitor or new speakers.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Narinik

The FX-8350 provides more cores and better multithreaded processing for modeling and rendering. Id also rather spend the money on other hardware like an extra monitor or new speakers.

According to what information?

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-4770k-haswell-review,3521-14.html

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/core_i7_4770k_review,17.html

http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Intel-Core-i74770K-Review-Haswell-Has-Landed/?page=14

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2013/06/01/intel-core-i7-4770k-cpu-review/7

and on and on... The i7 haswell consistently beats the FX-8350 while using less power.

FYI: The E3-1230V3 is for all intents and purposes an i7-4770 clocked to 3.3ghz, less the iGPU.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E3-1230+v3+%40+3.30GHz

Note the E3-1230V3 > FX-8350

Passmark scores are based on parallel workloads that are realistic recreations of real-world workloads in productivity applications (they have a separate chart for single threaded workloads). It is actually very representative of the real-world performance difference between chips.

(There are lots of haters who hate on big because they have nothing better to do than try to tear down anything that threatens their elitism/ego/etc, as such, you'll hear people basically "dismiss" pass-mark scores as meaningless, yet time and time again, they reflect what other reviews and benchmarks show within very reasonable margins. I think a lot of it stems from a distaste for success).

 

Went back to a few of the articles I had researched from a while ago. Looks like they were comparing to the 3770 not the 4770.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Narinik

I really dont play many games now since my machine is really outdated. Id like to get back on eve, maybe some of the newer shooters. Budget is about a grand with a little overflow. I do game dev and would like a machine that can handle some high poly 3d modeling, texturing and rendering hence the 4gb video card and 8 core processor. resolution? 1080p? is that the standard now? I dont think i need 4k.

I would like the possibility of running 3 or more monitors.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Narinik

Went back to a few of the articles I had researched from a while ago. Looks like they were comparing to the 3770 not the 4770.

I guess we are on the same boat

I normally do video editing and 3D. Honestly the 4770K is slightly faster then the 8350 in the task. It depends if you want to spend around £120 extra for like 5 percent increase. But from my experiance that the mistake I made, going from a 8350 to 4770K made barely any improvements but my work colleague has a 3960x which was a killer but that cost a bomb

I would go for a 8350 and buy a per-build water cooler (even if you for 4770K). Depending on how long and how much you work on 3D modeling or rendering the stock cooler will get loud so get a decent cooler and you would be good.

 

Get the 8320,clock it at 8350 levels (good chance you won't even need extra voltage), invest the difference on GPU/SSD etc. 4770k is an overall better cpu so If you can afford both it and the goodies go with that instead. But If your budget doesn't allow that, don't skimp on the GPU because you may end up with a slightly faster system for editing but noticeably worse for gaming.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by jmcconn110

This guy posts in the AMD forum and all he gets is a bunch of people telling him to go intel lol. 8350 is the best cpu price/performance out of anything similar, general guidelines, buy a good motherboard, buy good ram to go with it, 1.5V ram preferably.

If he were going to overclock it would be different. The FX-8350 is NOT the best price/performance in this case. The FX-8350/9370/9590 are AMD enthusiast novelty products for people who are specifically looking for a chance at a high OCing 8-core part. By the time we factor in a more expensive 990FX board (they start at $125 last I checked), +100W on the PSU, and likely change to a quieter CPU cooler because the stock one is a screamer, it costs MORE to implement than the E3-1230V3, which performs better in real world conditions.

I know when the Xeon stands out as the best value, and I know when the FX chips do. In this case, the Xeon wins. Especially for gaming performance (Which was indicated by the OP), where the FX parts have to be OCed into the 5ghz territory to be within the same class of performance.

Compare benchmarks of the i7-4770 to an FX-9590 in gaming. The Haswell @80W consistently performs on par or better at 1/3rd the power consumption. E3 is basically the same performance.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by mdocod

If he were going to overclock it would be different. The FX-8350 is NOT the best price/performance. By the time you factor in a more expensive 990FX board, +100W on the PSU, and likely change to a quieter CPU cooler because the stock one is a screamer, it costs MORE to implement than the E3-1230V3, which performs better in real world conditions.

I know when the Xeon stands out as the best value, and I know when the FX chips do. In this case, the Xeon wins hands down.

since the OP stated that he does not want to overclock then i would be inclined to agree with this post.
the fx is a great price to performance part ONLY when you overclock.

 

FX 8350 plus this motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157479
ASRock Killer 990FX

M.2 SSD socket equals double the speed of a SATA6 SSD.
You can't get all the features for that price on an Intel board.

 

I recently reviewed the 990FX killer,for a non overclocker it offers great value. Higher cost of 990FX vs cheap Z87 boards is a non issue since OP wants to go SLi and I think such Z87 board are priced quite higher than base models. I still believe FX 8320 is the chip to get if there is a strict budget ,the price difference between it and a xeon or an i7-4770k where I live is that of a 4GB 760 vs a 4GB 770 or a 290.

 

ASRock Extreme3 Z87, ASRock Z87 Fata1ty killer, ASRock Extreme4, MSI Z87-G55, Gigabyte GA-Z87X-HD3, Asus Z87-A.

ALL SLI capable Z87 boards. All around or under $130 (some as low as $110). Very comparable in price to "entry" level 990FX boards. The least expensive 990FX boards worth bothering with are the UD3 and EVO, which are usually ~$125 here in the states.

GPU performance has mostly to do with wow-factor graphics settings, and nothing to do with play-ability. Any game can be adjusted to run with smooth FPS on a GTX750 @ 1080P, but not every game will run smooth on a stock clocked FX-8320/8350 no matter what GPU we pair it with or what settings we apply.

If I'm building a non-OCing gaming rig, the ONLY contender that makes any sense at all is an intel chip. Doesn't matter how much the GPU has to suffer it's the only way to ensure that there is enough per-core performance to crest over the "minimums" that make the difference between playable and irritation caused by CPU deficiencies. PD@~4.7-5+ghz with tweaked NB/memory gets over that hump pretty good and can trade blows with stock clocked haswell rigs in gaming workloads well enough. Without that performance tuning the FX-8350 is OFTEN bested by the i3-4130 in games.

I'd rather have an E3-1230V3+GTX760 than a stock clocked FX-8350+GTX770 any day. The GTX760 consistently delivers 80-90% of the performance of the GTX770 for equal settings given the same CPU. There's no game out there that the GTX770 "unlocks" the ability to play with smooth results that the GTX760 can't. When paired with a stronger CPU on the more modern platform (lower latency from the GPU to the CPU and system memory on the Z87 platform), the E3+GTX760 will close the gap on the FX-8350+GTX770 even in GPU bound games so tight that the difference will be negligible.

On the other hand, the FX-8350, does NOT deliver 80-90% of the performance of the E3-1230V3 in gaming. In some games it will make no meaningful difference, but there ARE games that are hyper-sensitive to per-core performance, and in those games, the difference CAN be a deal-breaker for smooth irritation free play-ability. The E3 can literally wind up having DOUBLE (or better) the minimum FPS in those game engines that have too much stacked on a single thread. A high unit count match of Supreme Commander 2 or Starcraft 2 on a stock clocked PD chip is irritating (~15FPS in StarC2 or pulling below real-time game speeds in SupC2). On a haswell i5/E3/i7 chip it is 30+FPS even in worst case conditions and never drops below real-time.

 

I see it going for $115 on newegg (no idea how competitive it is and his original solid choice (990FXA-UD3) going for 125 so I am gonna call it a near wash.

Smoothness can be a red herring and minimums are overstated in your post. You may prefer the xeon and the 760 but fact remains an FX-8320 and a 770 will outperform and offer a superior gaming experience/more eye candy in most games out there. GTX 760 can and will dip low at places that a 770 will not. Your solution (dropping graphics detail) has a counter arguement. If he finds a game where the FX has unappealing drops he can always choose to reduce cpu load (eg mesh quality in BF games) or play with fewer players (bf4,maps,wow raids etc).It's the same reasoning.

In each and every GPU bound or mostly GPU bound game out there by going xeon+760 over FX+770 he gets a choice between lower performance or lower eye candy. FX+770 will not just offer 80-90% of xeon+760 performance,but 100%+. Not to mention the Xeon is no 4770k. It lacks 200Mhz and can't be overclocked, K/FX cpus offer that choice for future consideration.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kuivamaa

I see it going for $115 on newegg (no idea how competitive it is and his original solid choice (990FXA-UD3) going for 125 so I am gonna call it a near wash.

Smoothness can be a red herring and minimums are overstated in your post. You may prefer the xeon and the 760 but fact remains an FX-8320 and a 770 will outperform and offer a superior gaming experience/more eye candy in most games out there. GTX 760 can and will dip low at places that a 770 will not. Your solution (dropping graphics detail) has a counter arguement. If he finds a game where the FX has unappealing drops he can always choose to reduce cpu load (eg mesh quality in BF games) or play with fewer players (bf4,maps,wow raids etc).It's the same reasoning.

In each and every GPU bound or mostly GPU bound game out there by going xeon+760 over FX+770 he gets a choice between lower performance or lower eye candy. FX+770 will not just offer 80-90% of xeon+760 performance,but 100%+. Not to mention the Xeon is no 4770k. It lacks 200Mhz and can't be overclocked, K/FX cpus offer that choice for future consideration.

have you had sli on both fx and icore platforms?

I am far from an intel fanboy. But I did have single 660ti on a 5ghz fx6300. I had no complaints until adding the second card.

Anyway in bf4 on ultra 4msaa with 150% screen res 1080p the dips were bad with the fx.

Lowering seetings helped only slightly. I wanted the game maxed though and 660ti sli is titan level at 1080p so it should be maxed.

I really wanted to just move to 8core it would have saved me $200. I was lucky enough to get a friend to let me borrow his 8320 for a test on M4A99ex evo. It still had dips in bf4. It was locked at 75fps(monitor refresh) but it would dip to 45fps everytime a explosion popped.

45fps min was not acceptable to me. I switched to 4670k. And even at stock it never goes under 70fps now. I mean 70-75fps feels completely smooth.

Some people might be ok with dips into the 40s. It was jarring to me. Although most non cpu intensive games ran good without the dips I described. Bf4 64man was the worst though.

I even tried everything I could to keep from changing mobo/cpu. I got a bigger psu and went to 2600mhz ram, unparked cores ect.

If I was planning a build with the intention of sli later. Save yourself some cash and go intel on the front end.

I have nothing to gain here. I am just sharing my experience with sli on fx setup. I really like the fx line but its not ideal for multi gpu.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Wirerat

have you had sli on both fx and icore platforms?

I am far from an intel fanboy. But I did have single 660ti on a 5ghz fx6300. I had no complaints until adding the second card.

Anyway in bf4 on ultra 4msaa with 150% screen res 1080p the dips were bad with the fx.

Lowering seetings helped only slightly. I wanted the game maxed though and 660ti sli is titan level at 1080p so it should be maxed.

I really wanted to just move to 8core it would have saved me $200. I was lucky enough to get a friend to let me borrow his 8320 for a test on M4A99ex evo. It still had dips in bf4. It was locked at 75fps(monitor refresh) but it would dip to 45fps everytime a explosion popped.

45fps min was not acceptable to me. I switched to 4670k. And even at stock it never goes under 70fps now. I mean 70-75fps feels completely smooth.

Some people might be ok with dips into the 40s. It was jarring to me. Although most non cpu intensive games ran good without the dips I described. Bf4 was the worst though.

I even tried everything I could to keep from changing mobo/cpu. I got a bigger psu and went to 2600mhz ram, unparked cores ect.

If I was planning a build with the intention of sli later. Save yourself some cash and go intel on the front end.

I have nothing to gain here. I am just sharing my experience with sli on fx setup. I really like the fx line but its not ideal for multi gpu.

I don't disagree with what you say. The 6300 is a lesser chip though,i3 competitor, such behaviour is expected. Not sure why the difference 4670k vs 8320 on BF4, I have actually tried both on CFX/SLi (not my system, I review stuff) and they both get dips, tbh I find it hard to believe (due to experience, not that I believe you are lying) a stock 4670k keeps steady 70fps on BF4 SLi when it drops in the 50's often with a single card (~100% cpu usage) eg on siege of shanghai. As I said from scratch, 4770k is the top performer. If you can afford it without skimping on graphics, you get it and never look back. Now If certain specific games come to play, choice can be easier (For SC2 you don't even consider AMD CPU for example, for BF4 it is radeon on the graphics any day of the week due to mantle and so on). 4670k is a good call, btw. Might not have the raw performance of i7-4770k for encoding but it is cheaper and well rounded, op could check it out.

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kuivamaa

I don't disagree with what you say. The 6300 is a lesser chip though,i3 competitor, such behaviour is expected. Not sure why the difference 4670k vs 8320 on BF4, I have actually tried both on CFX/SLi (not my system, I review stuff) and they both get dips, tbh I find it hard to believe (due to experience, not that I believe you are lying) a stock 4670k keeps steady 70fps on BF4 SLi when it drops in the 50's often with a single card (~100% cpu usage) eg on siege of shanghai. As I said from scratch, 4770k is the top performer. If you can afford it without skimping on graphics, you get it and never look back. Now If certain specific games come to play, choice can be easier (For SC2 you don't even consider AMD CPU for example, for BF4 it is radeon on the graphics any day of the week due to mantle and so on). 4670k is a good call, btw. Might not have the raw performance of i7-4770k for encoding but it is cheaper and well rounded, op could check it out.

Well my bf4 experience now shows no dips that you can feel. My monitor is locked at 75fps. No vsync. My cpu is set to 4.6ghz and it goes up to 70% or so in bf4. The dips are gone. I have zero lag now. I can set bios to stock and that stays the same. No more big dips. I also wassnt able to run all ultra 4msaa and 150% on the fx. I set most of that up higher than needed just to get more gpu usage being limited to 75fps. I really cant see much difference in the msaa + screen res.

You mentioned a gtx 770. Well the guy who bought my ma499x and fx6300 paired it with a gtx 770. He clocked it at 4.5 and runs bf4 fine. Non of the big dips I described. The fx chips do not like a situation where it is heavily cpu bound. Duel gpu create that most of the time. But for one gpu. They are very fast actually.

 

GPU related performance "dips" are usually proportional to core configuration/speeds when comparing GPUs. The "worst case scenario" for a GTX760 is to "dip" to 75% of the performance of the GTX770. The only scenario where this is not the case, is if the lesser GPU runs into a VRAM limitation (like a 2GB vs 4GB card). There are ALWAYS settings that can be adjusted to achieve good smooth results on a middle tier GPU.

CPU related performance dips,are not always directly proportional to CPU performance. In game engines that are sensitive to per-core performance and have multiple jobs running within a single thread, performance dips can actually be logarithmically worse as CPU performance is reduced because of the way things compound in these poorly engineered workloads Some of the jobs that are running within a thread can be "slacked off" and others can not. The result of this is that, as CPU performance dips closer and closer to the "minimum" required to maintain real-time AI functions, there is nothing left for draw calls, which means, approaching 0FPS. In actuality, these games will begin to slack off of maintaining real-time in order to get SOME draw calls made instead, but there's no setting that can be reduced far enough to "solve" this problem on the graphical side. Choosing not to play a high player count, or high unit count game because the CPU can't keep up, is a far different limitation than choosing to reduce the graphical detail a notch. On paper, the "worst case scenario" for a "4.2ghz" turbo speed on the FX, may be "65%" as good as the "3.7ghz" turbo on the E3-1230V3 for single threaded performance, but in the real world, performance will dip to BELOW that 65% margin of difference in these workloads I am describing.

As an example: Piledriver @ ~4ghz, begins to slack off draw calls at ~1000 units in Supcom 2. It begins to fall behind real time at ~2000 units, and is bordering on pull-your-hair-out frustrating at 3000 units. Overclock it to 5ghz, and there is no noticeable "slack" all the way up to 2000+ units, and can even handle close to real-time with the full 4000 units. Increasing CPU performance by just 25% in this case, "solves" the performance problem on the CPU side and allows this game to be played all the way to the worst case conditions (8 player x 500 units each). There is no game settings that can solve any of this, the only thing that solves it is increasing CPU core performance. 25% increase in CPU performance winds up DOUBLING the number of units that the game engine can handle.

There are many game engines, that are forced to run multiple jobs within the same thread for many technical reasons. Obviously that is changing as software development adapts to the hardware, but the existence of current and future software that takes advantage of parallelism better does not solve the problem for existing software that many people still want to run.

Picking a step-down GPU in the middle-tier, will NOT dictate hard limits on what games you can play, or what conditions in those games your system can handle (unit/player count).
Picking a CPU with 25-35% lower performance in lightly threaded workloads, CAN dictate hard limits about what games you can play, or what conditions in those games your system can handle (unit/player count).

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by mdocod

GPU related performance "dips" with the full 4000 units. Increasing CPU.......... (unit/player count).

The dips I decribed felt more like microstutter. It wasnt complete freezes but more a jarring affect. It recovered fast. Increasing settings made it worse. I thought more settings might get he load onto the gpu but it had a negative affect.

I still think a single gpu even a very powrtful one like gtx 780 can work great without the dips I explained on a fx.

Maybe running the driver with multi gpu is more optimized for intel.

 

For your budget, i think it might be a little difficult to fit in that 4gb GPU, since right now the prices are quite high. If you want to go into the FX world, you can't go wrong. Are they the best in the world, no. But They are still none the less a great chip. Right now you can get an FX-6300 for about $120, and FX 6350 for about $140 ...and fx 8320 for $160 and and fx 8350 for $180-200 Depending if there are deals going on with newegg (which is often). All of them i think would be great for what you would use it for, and they all should last for the next 2-5 years (i might be a little optimistic there). Right now the cheapest 290 is the MSI r9 290 which is going for like $460. All other GPU's are going to be 500 and up, so if you are going into the 1000$ range, this will take up half your budget. A good psu, like stated by others 750+ would suit your needs and those can range from 70-160 depending on quality and whether you want a modular or non modular design. I personally like the corsair line of PSU, but thats all on you. Mobo, if you don't plan on OC'n then you can go with a cheaper MOBO that has 4+1 phase power, which are cheaper. If you want to OC go with something that has 8+2 phase power, like a gigabyte 990fxa - ud3/5. Had mine for 3 years, no issues and great price (~130-140$). Ram if you want 8 gb, your looking at another 60-90, newegg always has good prices and sales going on with ram. G.skill sniper / ripjaws or Corsair vengence would be really good. If you have a HDD already then theres is money saved, if you want faster snappier responses, go SSD. Those are getting cheaper nowadays too. You can either do what most like to do which is get a 60gb SSD and use it for OS only (it makes a difference trust me) and then use an HDD for other files/games/media. OR just go straight SSD's, but that will cut into your budget. Case? If you already have one great, if you want a mid tower, they arent that expensive, if you want a full tower, then those are pricer (100-200 on average). CPU cooler, if you don't plan on OC'n, you'll be fine with stock cooler if you dont mind the noise, it'll spin up to 3000 rpm or higher and will be kinda loud. Another option, Hyper 212 plus or hyper212 evo, both less than 30 bucks (sometimes less than 20) and compete with many high end coolers. I think that is the gist of it all. to recap:
CPU: ~120-180
GPU: ~460 - 500+ (you could also do an r9 280 3gb)
PSU: ~70-160
MOBO: ~80-150
RAM: ~60-90
SSD: ~60-170 (60gb/120gb/ and some 240gb ssds are included in this range)
HDD: ~80-100 for 1 tb
CPU: ~20-30
... I realize my prices are not exact, they are approximation just so you can get an idea of what to look for and how much you might be spending. For 700 for sure you will have a really good gaming rig. shop around and look for deals, newegg always has great deals / promos/ rebates. Amazon sometimes has good stuff too and every once in a while i find some good stuff from tigerdirect.
PS. I personally would not recommend going crossfire/sli, i feel there are just way to many annoying issues to worry about, and most new "next gen" games that have been coming out dont support crossfire/sli right of the bat, and the drivers that seem to be coming out seem to get worse. I know not everyone has these issues, but when i get into the forums i know im not alone. Just something to consider before you spend over a grand on GPU's alone. One strong card is all you need IMO. Hope this helps.