I have a budget of approx £200 ish. Plan on building a mini rig so matx or Itx for light gaming videos and excel etc. already have a 550W PSU and SSD and load of HD's so have saved a bit there, Just not sure whether to go new AMD i.e AM3+ with FX-6300 where Matx is limited and would need discrete GPU so will have to up the budget a bit, but happy to go with something like a 2nd had 460 or AMD equiv. which will be very tight on the budget or wait a bit for FM2+ boards to come out and stick a 6800/5800 FM2 Chip- this route means for a while i can forget about the GPU and i have an upgrade route should i want to stick the next gen AMD APU in. Would like to get a current FM2 due to no idea on when i can actually be able to buy a FM2+, but seems slight pointless to buy what will be obsolete AMD. Imo at leas the Intel sandy bridge gear is no where near obsolete yet. or go for a older Intel..either i5 2500K and rely on onboard untill can afford GPU.
if you could find a second hand i5 2500k that would be the way forward I reckon. Then bosh in new gfx can when you you can - last way longer and give you less bottleneck in gfx perf. Also, define "light gaming". To me that could be bejeweled blitz 2 for instance or something a bit more demanding. I think clearing your intentions here will lead to the most accurate advice.
If light gaming means things like Portal, Trackmania and Minecraft, a high end FM2 (5800K and 6800K) chip with some fast RAM and a value mobo will be around £200 to £220. If you're definitely going to get a discreet GPU at some point, then 2nd hand Sandy Bridge is still a great option.
Second hand out of the marketplace here could save you quite a lot of cash. If you have the monies ready put up a wanted thread and see what people are offering. Going down the Intel Route would give you more grunt overall though, but likely cost a little more.
light gaming is ArmA 3/ Day z/ BF3/4, GTA 5 (f and when it arrives), rome 3, Portal etc Not to bothered about having all the settings on ultra tbh, just want it to be playable and not look like utter shite, I mean my old 2500K along with my 560TI, could do what i required, which had to be sold cos of my car blowing up but i was just thinking of giving the boys down at AMD a chance again..
IF you are wanting to play those fairly heavy games you might as well just try and get the equivalent parts to what you sold, for the money cant think of a better combo than a i5 and a 560 Ti. Coming from that to a APU would be a disappointment imo.
I wouldn't go AMD APU with those games... unless you don't mind lowest settings at 720p. If you were boshing out a game of fifa(sports games etc) and games over 3 years old then you'd be happy(with lots of notable exceptions). Obviously for excel, I wouldn't worry about it unless you do a whole load of lookups on massive spreadsheets - and even then I get the feeling you are held back by your storage method, not your cpu. Shame as your previous hardware sounds ideal...
I agree they were banging bits. Just wasn't sure what teh AMD Apu's were like or go for even older Intel i.e 1156
problem is if you know what to expect the APUs are great value. There is really no competition for them. But you have to kerb your expectations of what they can deliver. Which is 720p @ low settings. If you can live with that then great.
batman ac @ medium gets 50fps on a 5800k with 1866ram.... and gets 30 fps at high at 1080p bioshock infinite thats GT640 performance. they are far better than some people will ever give credit for them - effectively thay have a 6670 on die and can crossfire with 1.
Oh yeah for sure. I'd definitely put one in my living room. And be more than happy in most games... but there is still a problem with crossfire though... or dual graphics mode... yikey crikey ****ing what?
the 7750 doesnt work in crossfire - its GCN and the 6800k isnt.... THW know that so why did they even bother i dont know. so with that small minor detail - that amd have stated it doesnt work (kaveri will), throws out any sort of `journalism` that THW do... that and unlike BT they dont rebench with new drivers when new hardware is released....
Its comments like this that have me interested ... If i can get those sorts of levels im a happy chappy.
seems like getting my hands on a second hand i5 2500K is difficult, would it be worth looking for a I5 3570K?
After a lot of looking i'm coming to conclusion of looking to get a FX 6300 with a 7870... with a nice little AM3+ board.. thoughts?
All very good parts, just be warned if you plan to stick the 6300 in a matx motherboard it will throttle all the time due to power requirements. Is atx not possible?
AMD isn't bad way to go with a dedicated gpu, since most modern cpus are all capable (anandtech show this in a couple of recent amd reviews). I'm going to a 760k in a mitx board soon. You should be able to find a decent matx board for your 6300
