i7 930 vs. FX 6***

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xTrident

Limp Gawd
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Got a buddy with an AM3+ mobo currently running an Athlon II x2 (maybe 260?). That build was centered around a strict budget with hand-me-downs. Well I'd guess primarily the Athlon II is showing it's age at this point as he is having some stuttering issues gaming.

Because he has an AM3+ mobo (that was intentional for upgrade purposes down the road) I'm thinking now might be the time to upgrade. The dilemma is I have an i7 930 platform available which I know is going to be much faster than his Athlon II. But the question is will it be much better than the FX-6*** series? I've tried to find comparisons online between these two chips and am having a hell of a time. I did do a comparison at cpuboss.com and that's primarily the reason I'm asking here. Imo cpuboss really shows the 6*** being a little better. Also considering I believe I'll be able to get even an FX-6100 for around $60, the price really isn't a big deal either.

I will say at this point I'm leaning towards trading him straight up platform for platform and letting him just run the i7 for a while.

His Athlon II x2 is not overclocked, 4GB Ram, paired with an XFX 6950 2GB.
i7 930 is not overclocked (could be modestly - thinking around 3.2 as I was having overclocking stability issues later on with it) 12GB Ram, paired with I believe a Diamond 7970 3GB.

If I went with an FX chip I almost think we'd have to add in 8GB Ram for him as well. And I might consider swapping cards. I realize the i7 930 has a lot more going for it at this point, and it would also essentially be free since I already have it.

I guess my bottom line is which platform is better between the two? And I suppose we could lightly take into consideration an 8*** series cpu could be dropped into the AMD build.

Thanks in advance.

Edit - Forgot to add the games - Mechwarrior online is the biggest one and from what I've read it's very much a single threaded application so it favors Intel. But also consider games like Sins of a Solar Empire, World of Tanks, Armored Warfare, Company of Heroes 2, Crysis etc...
 
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Something that gnaws me with either choice....Good luck getting motherboard drivers.

I'm still running a Sandybridge LGA1155 Xeon, a platform much better than either you are proposing....there are no motherboard drivers for Windows 10 for my board. I have a USB3 wifi-AC stick that throttles to 2megabit/second when plugged into my motherboard USB3 ports-but works fine on USB2. Can't do anything about it as there are no motherboard drivers for W10.

Sure your pal can run W7....but them days ain't going to last forever.


That being said...Nehalem was a fire breather in heat. How's his setup for cooling? The X58 chip alone puts out a ton of heat...and the 7970 GPU wasn't renowned for low TDP either.
 
Skripka said:
Something that gnaws me with either choice....Good luck getting motherboard drivers.

I'm still running a Sandybridge LGA1155 Xeon, a platform much better than either you are proposing....there are no motherboard drivers for Windows 10 for my board. I have a USB3 wifi-AC stick that throttles to 2megabit/second when plugged into my motherboard USB3 ports-but works fine on USB2. Can't do anything about it as there are no motherboard drivers for W10.

Sure your pal can run W7....but them days ain't going to last forever.


That being said...Nehalem was a fire breather in heat. How's his setup for cooling? The X58 chip alone puts out a ton of heat...and the 7970 GPU wasn't renowned for low TDP either.
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Drivers aren't an issue, I still have the disc for the i7 neatly filed away with my other driver discs. ;-) - I see you're referencing drivers for the OS.

The heat and longevity... We're thinking just the same! The heat on that i7 930 was definitely an issue, couldn't agree more. That's also why I'm thinking just a modest overclock if anything. I was running it at 4.0GHz first on air, then switched to water because frankly... It needed a better cooling solution. The i7 build is going to be a scorcher anyway because that 7970 is also a furnace like you said. I think for his wants/needs it would be okay. Plus... It's free. Free is the number one dilemma otherwise a 6*** would be a no brainer to me.

And Windows 7 Home would be the OS in use.

Also, I have priced out the Sandy Bridge thing as I've seen some 2500k's on sale... It seems people want $100 just for that cpu not including a mobo, RAM (because I'd really prefer 8 gig, and possibly another OS purchase) That's really getting out of the budget. He doesn't have any money for it so the AMD chip is more of a gift from me and I don't want to spend that much. $100 for the chip and RAM is what I'm willing to do and that includes getting the Athlon II and 4GB ram back from him.
 
xTrident said:
Drivers aren't an issue, I still have the disc for the i7 neatly filed away with my other driver discs. ;-) - I see you're referencing drivers for the OS.

The heat and longevity... We're thinking just the same! The heat on that i7 930 was definitely an issue, couldn't agree more. That's also why I'm thinking just a modest overclock if anything. I was running it at 4.0GHz first on air, then switched to water because frankly... It needed a better cooling solution. The i7 build is going to be a scorcher anyway because that 7970 is also a furnace like you said. I think for his wants/needs it would be okay. Plus... It's free. Free is the number one dilemma otherwise a 6*** would be a no brainer to me.

And Windows 7 Home would be the OS in use.

Also, I have priced out the Sandy Bridge thing as I've seen some 2500k's on sale... It seems people want $100 just for that cpu not including a mobo, RAM (because I'd really prefer 8 gig, and possibly another OS purchase) That's really getting out of the budget. He doesn't have any money for it so the AMD chip is more of a gift from me and I don't want to spend that much. $100 for the chip and RAM is what I'm willing to do and that includes getting the Athlon II and 4GB ram back from him.
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Drivers probably will still be on W10. Unless you've already tried it, I'll bet money they motherboard drivers will not install in Windows 10.

Sandy was quite the upgrade from any platform that came before it. It ran a ton faster, could OC a ton higher, and all while running cooler. It was a huge leap, whereas everything before and after was really incremental marginal gains. That platform's viability is such that I'm still running it now going on 7 years on. Doesn't hold back my sig rig running Fallout 4, and that is a Xeon with locked multiplier (running at stock speeds).


For those benches of i7-900 vs FX6***...this is about the only one you'll find on Anand: http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1281?vs=47 or http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/699?vs=47

It is old tech either way, with all the catches and caveats of being old tech.
 
Damn, I had forgotten Anandtech had that comparison on their site. *facepalm* I've used it many a times before!

Thanks for those links, but do you see how damn close they are? Honestly I think letting him use the i7 930 for the time being is the better way to go. No cost, I've actually got a clean install of Windows 7 on it right now even. It needs a little bit of tinkering with better cooling since he'll be gaming on it but otherwise I think it's the best way to go right now.

Don't get me wrong... I'd love to throw an i3 Skylake build together for him but the cost is just too much right now.

I appreciate your input. Thank you much!
 
LigTasm said:
Thats a pretty terrible 4+1 board for an FX chip, I wouldn't risk anything past a stock 6300 on it. Just to throw that at your decision.
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Understood - It was cheap when we got it because of the budget issues. I kind of figured it was.
 
xTrident said:
Understood - It was cheap when we got it because of the budget issues. I kind of figured it was.
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It might do OK with something like an 8320E in it as well, I just wouldn't figure on any overclocking. Regardless, a 6300 would be a gigantic improvement over what he has. IMO, since X58 boards are hard to come by I would sell that stuff for a little profit and grab a 6300 and maybe another 4GB of RAM. I'm not a big fan on hand-me-down systems of significant age, which the 1366 stuff is getting old at this point and it always ran hot. Age+heat = bad.
 
LigTasm said:
It might do OK with something like an 8320E in it as well, I just wouldn't figure on any overclocking. Regardless, a 6300 would be a gigantic improvement over what he has. IMO, since X58 boards are hard to come by I would sell that stuff for a little profit and grab a 6300 and maybe another 4GB of RAM. I'm not a big fan on hand-me-down systems of significant age, which the 1366 stuff is getting old at this point and it always ran hot. Age+heat = bad.
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Well I'll give you a little more insight of what's going on. The two platforms in my sig are mine, the i7 930 is currently my girlfiends. She didn't have a desktop and I had that as a spare so I took that over to her. Thing is she rarely uses it, and definitely doesn't game.... But then there's always me. I'd like to have a somewhat competent machine at her place for me. Well my buddies Athlon II would do just fine for me and then he could potentially get a better rig for himself. If I decided to sell the 930 that would in turn make a lot more work for me. Tearing that build down, replacing the cpu in his build, rebuilding the Athlon II (because I really want a desktop at her place) as well as the process of selling and buying.

I'm not saying I'm going to disregard what you've said. It's stored in the back of my head that he simply needs something newer/better. That will happen farther down the road when he has more money or I decide I'll spend more.
 
Well I guess the question is about the fx 6300 is where are you getting it, Micro Center has it for $90, as said earlier$99 the 8320e might work in that board it is $99, you could even get $40 off a board if you have a store near by. With all of that being said I think that even a pentium haswell dual core might give a way better experience(until you get past 2 cores needed), $45 for a g3260 and a cheapo 1150 mobo.

Really though the value on the 1366 board you have is getting one of the cheap 6 core xeon chips and ocing it.

Just my 2c though
 
Skripka said:
So long as you don't want to OC.

Those Nehalem setups got fussy in OCing with either more than 6GB of RAM or more than 3 DIMMs loaded.
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Which ironically enough is when I started noticing my OC'ing problems... Started with 6GB of RAM overclocked just fine. Decided I wanted 12GB of RAM and ran into stability problems. I don't think we'll be overclocking.
 
rhansen5_99 said:
Well I guess the question is about the fx 6300 is where are you getting it, Micro Center has it for $90, as said earlier$99 the 8320e might work in that board it is $99, you could even get $40 off a board if you have a store near by. With all of that being said I think that even a pentium haswell dual core might give a way better experience(until you get past 2 cores needed), $45 for a g3260 and a cheapo 1150 mobo.

Really though the value on the 1366 board you have is getting one of the cheap 6 core xeon chips and ocing it.

Just my 2c though
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No Microcenter near me. I've been checking Ebay for the FX 6300. The FX 6300 seem to sell in the $80 range, while the FX 6100 is in the $65ish range.

For sure if I was building from the ground up an i3, or that Pentium G3260 would be on my radar.
 
I cant believe all the debate over this....Intel Bloomfield or later cpus are far superior to ANY amd setup. I thought this was common knowledge these days....is it not? What do i know lol
 
ManofGod said:
Because it is that board, the I7-930 is the only choice that you can make. That board has a VRM section that is 4+1 phase with no cooling whatsoever.
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Hey ManofGod, when I looked at the Newegg link I noticed it said 4+1 phase, although I don't know what that means. Is that something you could explain to me or should I just look it up?

primetime said:
I cant believe all the debate over this....Intel Bloomfield or later cpus are far superior to ANY amd setup. I thought this was common knowledge these days....is it not? What do i know lol
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I wouldn't have even brought this post up but I actually did some benchmark research before doing such. And by doing such it "shows" the FX-6*** very close if not even winning a few benchmarks over the i7 930. Add in the age of the 930 compared to some of the FX-6*** and I thought maybe I should ask in Hard Forums and see what others thought.

Anyway as an update over the weekend I gave him my i7 930 and we did some gaming. Plays MUCH better than the Athlon II... Which was expected. I think he'll be happy with it for a couple years. But then that'll be ~7 years the 930 has been going just for me. Yeah, it is definitely a hot running machine, but damn it's still quite competent. And again - it didn't cost anything to swap.
 
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x58 is the chipset that just keeps going.......it can actually outmatch brand new skylakes in certain tasks...i also hear now people have figured out how to use NVME SSD's as primary os drives and full windows 10 driver support....I truly hope my next build is this solid
 
xTrident said:
Hey ManofGod, when I looked at the Newegg link I noticed it said 4+1 phase, although I don't know what that means. Is that something you could explain to me or should I just look it up?



I wouldn't have even brought this post up but I actually did some benchmark research before doing such. And by doing such it "shows" the FX-6*** very close if not even winning a few benchmarks over the i7 930. Add in the age of the 930 compared to some of the FX-6*** and I thought maybe I should ask in Hard Forums and see what others thought.

Anyway as an update over the weekend I gave him my i7 930 and we did some gaming. Plays MUCH better than the Athlon II... Which was expected. I think he'll be happy with it for a couple years. But then that'll be ~7 years the 930 has been going just for me. Yeah, it is definitely a hot running machine, but damn it's still quite competent. And again - it didn't cost anything to swap.
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Basically, a 4 +1 power phase setup on AMD boards are insufficient for FX based processors. At the very least, they will run really hot or, if it is an FX 8 core, blow up. The guys on overclock.net could describe it better than I did but, that is the gist of it.
 
what board?
If it's a good board, you could throw a cheaper xeon in there and will run cooler and oc way better for $60-90 and sell that 930 for $20-30 ish
 
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