AMD's Piledriver and K10 architecture faceoff

Guys, check out the extensive review in Tomshardware: AMD's Piledriver And K10 CPU Architectures Face Off - Targeting Budget-Minded Enthusiasts With AMD CPUs

This review will clear many of your doubts about choosing the right Processor for your needs.

IMO For Day - today gaming, a simple quad core with a decent card is enough.

Nice improvements there anyway with Piledriver. AM3+ is kinda future proof according to me.

Not a simple quad core. You need one with good amount of L3 cache and good overclocking capabilities. That's why the Athlon II X4 processors were not able to keep up with the Phenom II X4 and FX X4 processors.
The real sweet things are FX-6350 and FX-6300 which was dominating that price segment and currently Intel i3 processors are not at all recommended. In the recent games, FX-6350 has kicked everyone out of the competition and if you bring CPU intensive workloads, even FX quad cores kicked out the i3 3220.

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After reading that review and my hands on experience on Stracraft 2 Heart of Swarm, Its safe to say that my good ol Phenom X4 955 still has some juice left for another 1-2 years of decent gaming. Also FX6350 seems to be a viable and cheap upgrade over my current processor.

^^ Are you overclocking? Overclock the processor to 3.8 GHz + level and fetch the juice out of your Phenom II 955 BE. I used to own one and was able to reach 3.5 GHz with the stock cooler. So with Hyper 212 EVO, I think 3.8 GHz is pretty much possible.

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I have ran it stable on 4Ghz earlier. Currently running it at stock frequency with lowered Voltage & Still it plays SC2 on Max Visual Enabled without any issues. Will overclock soon though as sometimes in 4x4 Multi it tends to lag a bit.

Great to know that my CPU is still powerful enough to last another year or two lol

And even mine is running at stock with lowered frequency xD

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^^ Running at stock with lowered frequency?

Tech_Wiz said:
^^ Running at stock with lowered frequency?

Voltage >_>

Cilus said:
even FX quad cores kicked out the i3 3220.

AnandTech | Bench - CPU

not to forget about overall cost, IGP, power consumption....
so i3-3220 is still there...

Now, in power consumption, the idle power consumption is more or less same here, around 10W higher for FX series. But when you run an intense application which can stress all the cores, no doubt, power consumption is higher with FX series, but if the application needs long time, say in case of a video encoding from Bluray to X264 using hanbrake, FX-6300 will take reasonably shorter time period. So overall power consumption in this case might be similar if you consider the total period of time, the application is running.

Cilus said:
^^ Are you overclocking? Overclock the processor to 3.8 GHz + level and fetch the juice out of your Phenom II 955 BE. I used to own one and was able to reach 3.5 GHz with the stock cooler. So with Hyper 212 EVO, I think 3.8 GHz is pretty much possible.

I can't go over 3.8 Ghz with hyper 212 evo but then again it may be due I've a b2 rev. cpu and the temp hovers around ~52c, anyway, thanks for sharing the review

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I got the later revision and stable it at 4 GHz (Stable = Runs all my games and software without crash. Never tried the Stability Check softwares as such). Temperature does seem to shoot though. But max I got under load is like 70 Deg. which I think is below its threshold.

Tech_Wiz said:
I got the later revision and stable it at 4 GHz (Stable = Runs all my games and software without crash. Never tried the Stability Check softwares as such). Temperature does seem to shoot though. But max I got under load is like 70 Deg. which I think is below its threshold.

Voltage?
Cause even I have the C3 version and would like to over clock some time in future for a long term

Cilus said:
^^ Are you overclocking? Overclock the processor to 3.8 GHz + level and fetch the juice out of your Phenom II 955 BE. I used to own one and was able to reach 3.5 GHz with the stock cooler. So with Hyper 212 EVO, I think 3.8 GHz is pretty much possible.

I OC it to 3.7Ghz . I oculd never run it stable at 3.8Ghz. I have CM Hyper N620 CPU cooler. 3.7 Ghz is the max I could push it to.
PS: I have the C3 revision

classic example of all chip can't be oced to the same speed

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Yep. All Hail my luck Please

@ZTR: I did the OC like an year back. Can't recall exact values but I think it was between 1.4v to 1.5v.

I think I will get my hands dirty with OC tonight and post result tomorrow

if you can do try running prime95 small FFT test and post the temps - 1 hour should be enough but keep a close eye on the mobo and cpu temp though - you have been warned

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I only fire up Prime95 when I am feeling cold

As long as my most demanding game (SC2 HoTS) runs smooth for hours without issues then its stable for me

StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm has any in game benchmark option ?

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It has a FPS show counter that's all I think. I get Minimum 70 FPS with all eye candy at max settings. 1440x900 resolution. GPU temp is also shown and its around 80 Deg after a couple of hours play. This is at stock CPU Frequency (3.2 Ghz)

Thanks for the info .. let us know the fps once you start the OCing again.

BTW, I would really like to see some guys with their c2d E8400/E8600 @ 4.5 Ghz / Q9550/9650 oced as according to the test they have showed very good results. That time many guys have got those cpus but I don't see many owners of those cpus now.