# Which CPU?



## Akau (Apr 22, 2011)

Hey there! I'm new to these forums so please bear with me as I might not be totally used to the format. 

Onto the question at hand, I recently "Upgraded" the CPU in my computer from a AMD Phenom 8650 X3 (3 cores at 2.3GHz, 3.5MB Cache on L2 and L3) to a AMD Athlon II X4 645 (4 cores at 3.1GHz, 2MB L2 cache). I am finding really mixed ideas on my choice of an "upgrade". One side is saying something like "ohh yeah, that was a great upgrade especially for the price!" the other side is sort of saying "Ohh you're such a n00blet your Phenom was faster, a phenom is always faster than an athlon" So I'm not really sure where to go with that D: 

I looked up passmark scores, and the 645 (Athlon II X4) scored almost double the points that my old 8650 (Phenom X3) scored. I looked also at a review of it on tech power up ( http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/Athlon_II_X4_645/ ) and it looked like it was a good deal, coming just around/under the Phenom II 940. But what do you think? 

I ask this mainly because, I haven't been able to find a comparison between a 8650 and a 645 or the more popular 640 even. Was this a good upgrade? 

Other information: I do a good fair amount of gaming on my machine, three of my games are recommending quad cores (BFBC2 and GTA IV, Metro 2033) But I also do a real fair amount of HD video editing, artwork in photoshop/sai etc. I am looking into getting into a little bit of 3D animation work too. 

I didn't notice a huge increase in performance in games. Everyone was saying that my CPU was a masive bottleneck to my system, but either the Athlon isn't any better at gaming, or all those people were naive and my GPU was actually the problem. 

System specs if this makes any difference. 
Motherboard: Gigabyte MA790X-UD4P
CPU: AMD Athlon II X4 645 3.1GHz (replacing a AMD Phenom X3 8650 2.3GHz)
RAM: 4GB G.skill DDR2 1066 (have the room to upgrade to 8GB)
GPU: Nvidia GTS 250 512MB OC edition, Nvidia 8800GTS 320MB PhysX card.
HDD: Western Digital Caviar Black edition 640GB
PSU: Corsair 750W power supply. 

Thanks a ton, I really appreciate the advice. I have something like 13 days left that I could exchange the CPU back so I wanted to hear a few more opinions. If it makes any difference too I bought the Athlon X4 instead of a Phenom 955 or something because this bad boy was on sale for $93.80 retail box, not OEM.


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## Lobar (Apr 23, 2011)

I'm not an expert, but I'd certainly trust passmark over random guys on the internet, particularly those working under such broad assumptions as "a phenom always outperforms an athlon".  In getting an athlon, you essentially traded your L3 cache for that boost in clock speed, but I don't think that represents that big a loss in performance as these guys are making it sound.  Other posters here would know more, though.

And I would have to say that your GPU does look a bit underwhelming, especially for Metro 2033.  Most games these days are GPU-limited than anything else, and that should be your next upgrade.


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## Akau (Apr 23, 2011)

Lobar said:


> I'm not an expert, but I'd certainly trust passmark over random guys on the internet, particularly those working under such broad assumptions as "a phenom always outperforms an athlon".  In getting an athlon, you essentially traded your L3 cache for that boost in clock speed, but I don't think that represents that big a loss in performance as these guys are making it sound.  Other posters here would know more, though.
> 
> And I would have to say that your GPU does look a bit underwhelming, especially for Metro 2033.  Most games these days are GPU-limited than anything else, and that should be your next upgrade.



Yeah, I was hoping I could trust passmark but it's hard to trust sources these days since Intel might be pouring money into them to make AMD processors look bad or something like that, then some review websites have a bad bias leaning towards Intel or AMD (usually towards Intel from what I've seen) but that's a whole nother argument. The arguments saying I made a bad choice come from some guys who are way into hardware and some who aren't so that's what was confusing me a lot. 

And yeah I think the GTS 250 is really showing it's age. I did pick it up 1.5 years ago for $99.99 since BFG Tech was going bust and selling their cards really cheap. I was sort of thinking of going for an AMD 6870 or something like that. I don't really care if it's Nvidia or AMD really I'm pretty neutral in that whole debate.


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## Commiecomrade (Apr 24, 2011)

Your GPU is the true bottleneck of your system. Comparatively speaking, a 512 MB 250 isn't up to par. I don't know your budget, but I'd recommend at least what I have; a 1 GB 470 GTX.


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## Runefox (Apr 24, 2011)

Athlon II == Old-school Phenoms. So you got a clean upgrade no matter what, really. The high-end Ath II's are actually pretty decent, and while the Phenom II's are faster still, they're also generally a good bit more expensive. The GTS 250 isn't a BAD card, but it actually is basically just a rebranded 8800/9600, so you might actually be better off SLI'ing the two if it's possible (I know ATi/AMD would let you do that, but I'm not terribly familiar with nVidia's SLI offerings).


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## ToeClaws (Apr 25, 2011)

I agree with the GPU being the primary bottleneck statement.  You can go out today and buy the most basic dual-core el-cheapo CPU and still play the most sophisticated games on the market so long as you got a good GPU 'cause that's where 80% of the work is being done.  In your case since you're doing some more CPU intensive stuff outside of gaming, I think your choice is fine.  CPU gains/losses between the Athlon X4 and a Phenom II... well, there would be some gains upping to Phenom II, but I'm not sure they'd be tangible enough to justify the expense (bear in mind that often with exchanges, you may still need to pay a restocking fee).  I say go with what you go for now in and you find in a few months time or in a year that it's getting slow, then upgrade - your money will go further in the future than it will now.  If performance suffers on games, then change out the GPU.


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## Tissemand (Apr 25, 2011)

You could had bought an 3-core or even 2-core CPU and "unlocked" it to have four cores, assuming you have the right CPU + Mobo for it. Also, if you feel that your CPU is a bottle neck, you could overclock it a few hundred MHz. You could also wait until AMD's Bulldozer processors are released, which are rumored to be a vast improvement over the Phenom series.

Nonetheless, I would upgrade the card at least to GTX 460 or maybe even a 5770, if you choose to use ATI.


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## Commiecomrade (Apr 25, 2011)

ToeClaws said:


> I agree with the GPU being the primary bottleneck statement.  You can go out today and buy the most basic dual-core el-cheapo CPU and still play the most sophisticated games on the market so long as you got a good GPU 'cause that's where 80% of the work is being done.


 
For some reason I didn't have the balls to say this. Thank you.


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## Akau (Apr 26, 2011)

Runefox said:


> Athlon II == Old-school Phenoms. So you got a clean upgrade no matter what, really. The high-end Ath II's are actually pretty decent, and while the Phenom II's are faster still, they're also generally a good bit more expensive. The GTS 250 isn't a BAD card, but it actually is basically just a rebranded 8800/9600, so you might actually be better off SLI'ing the two if it's possible (I know ATi/AMD would let you do that, but I'm not terribly familiar with nVidia's SLI offerings).


 
Ohh okay, good to know really. As for the GTS 250 though it's actually a rebranded 8800Ultra, then they made a higher clocked card and called it the 9800GTX+ and that's essentially what my GTS 250 is. it's 128 stream processors where the 9600 and comparable 8800 had something like 92 stream processors I think. Also it's clocked really high for what it is. 750Mhz on the core clock and because of this it's essentially the power of a GTX 260 just with less memory. And my board as mentioned is a AMD chipset 790X. This chip only allows for Nvidia PhysX or full on crossfire.


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## Akau (Apr 26, 2011)

Commiecomrade said:


> Your GPU is the true bottleneck of your system. Comparatively speaking, a 512 MB 250 isn't up to par. I don't know your budget, but I'd recommend at least what I have; a 1 GB 470 GTX.


 
Ohh yeah, the GTS 250 is showing its age as it's a rebranded 9800GTX+ which came out ages ago. I probably am not interested in the GeForce 4XX anything series. I might consider something like the 560Ti but even then, I'll always be running AMD processors so I probably need to find a good equivalent, was thinking of maybe a HD6950 1GB ? they go for about $239.99


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## Akau (Apr 26, 2011)

ToeClaws said:


> I agree with the GPU being the primary bottleneck statement.  You can go out today and buy the most basic dual-core el-cheapo CPU and still play the most sophisticated games on the market so long as you got a good GPU 'cause that's where 80% of the work is being done.  In your case since you're doing some more CPU intensive stuff outside of gaming, I think your choice is fine.  CPU gains/losses between the Athlon X4 and a Phenom II... well, there would be some gains upping to Phenom II, but I'm not sure they'd be tangible enough to justify the expense (bear in mind that often with exchanges, you may still need to pay a restocking fee).  I say go with what you go for now in and you find in a few months time or in a year that it's getting slow, then upgrade - your money will go further in the future than it will now.  If performance suffers on games, then change out the GPU.


 
Well, I'm not really sure about that logic on the CPU as even my triple core Phenom was struggling over Battlefield, Metro 2033 and GTA IV. These games are optimized to run on dual core at the least, then quad/hexi/opti cores at the best really so it seems. I sort of think/hope that this will become the new trend or maybe with Windows 7 could come the ability for parallel processing with something using OpenCL or some language like that, but then again I'm not a programmer and know these limitations lol. 

And yeah, some of the programs are really dependent on CPU still and haven't worked themselves over to GPU "Cuda" or "OpenGL" computing yet. I think this to an extent will always be a little bit of the case. As for future proofing I think the upgrade of the CPU gave this system maybe another 6 months or so of extended life, I will probably update the GPU when money allows for it, but the GPU can be transferred to a new system or something like that and isn't as tied in as the choice in CPU was. Performance in games is already suffering a little. PhysX performance is a joke on the setup I have which is a bit depressing. that technology is the biggest gimmick ever! thanks for your input though :3


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## Akau (Apr 26, 2011)

Tissemand said:


> You could had bought an 3-core or even 2-core CPU and "unlocked" it to have four cores, assuming you have the right CPU + Mobo for it. Also, if you feel that your CPU is a bottle neck, you could overclock it a few hundred MHz. You could also wait until AMD's Bulldozer processors are released, which are rumored to be a vast improvement over the Phenom series.
> 
> Nonetheless, I would upgrade the card at least to GTX 460 or maybe even a 5770, if you choose to use ATI.



Well... the 3 cores are hard to find, my motherboard's chipset I don't believe supports of unlocking the cores unless you're manually tweaking voltages and weird things like that and I'm not totally comfortable doing that. Even then a 3-2 core Phenom II was the same cost as my already quad core CPU and there's no guarantee it will unlock successfully. 

Waiting for bulldozer...isn't really going to do me any good. I have a 2 year old 790X chipset and a AM3 motherboard. Bulldozer/Llano is going to be AM3+ or AM4 if I'm not mistaken. This thread was about "What CPU to put in my current system" not so much as what system to build next, though I might ask here for opinions at the end of the summer if I'm building one then. 

As for the GPU, that's next on my list. I was stupid and listened to fanboys about how my CPU was holding the GTS 250 back when that wasn't the case at all.


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