Meaningful upgrade for my cpu

Welp, with all the threads asking for help with parts I might as well get some opinions too. I have an AMD PhenomII X6 1090T sat here, happily bumbling along on an Asus crosshair IV formula motherboard. Don't fancy replacing the mobo but I do want a significant upgrade... I have a few options in mind, mainly picks from the fx series but I wonder what you guys think.

 

i7!!!! *incomprehensible babble*

Honestly, Id go 8350 in your case, or even 9590 or whatever if you want to make this last for a while. With the race update boosting AMD chips, Pretty much any 8xxx chip will do you good. Youll likely see a major jump from the 8xxx over you old x6.

 

a solid state drive

 

Does that mainboard accept AM3+ socket CPUs ? After looking a bit, it doesn't seem to. You're in the same place I am. I need a new motherboard before anything. If I did have to choose though, I would get an FX-8320 CPU if I was going to upgrade my mainboard right now.

 

Thats whats confusing me, Some places say you can and some say you can't. Don't know what to make of it. Apparently The Crosshair IV Formula has the option to be a am3+ socket motherboard and run the first gen FX cpus with a bios update... and I suppose it'd include the piledriver series. My other worry is power limitations. Not from my PSU, I'm never going to overload a 1200W PSU but its motherboard limitations. Its a quickie upgrade to pull me through 2 years and then it'll be new system time when the next generation of sockets is out.

 

Some am3 boards did, some didn't. If it is a lower end mobo the power might not be safe, but you were running a phenom x6 so I doubt it. What makes it hard is you not being an american. I don't know the pricing. I think either a i5 4670 or FX-8150 would be great choices depending on combos and stuff.

 

Its a good motherboard, believe me. It may be between the FX 8350 or the 9370 depending on what my mobo can deal with.

 

would make no difference...

 

also, hardly a good choice for a primary storage device. They're comparatively unreliable because there are limitations on the read/writeability of flash and best used as backup storage only. Especially with a really decent high rpm magnetic drive sat here, data transfer is as fast as I need it.

 

Finally, voices of reason about SSDs! I hate it when I see someone asking how to improve their performance in game, and the first reply is dyurbvcxxuebfyfSSDdybded! NO. All that will do is improve your load times. If you're slow because you're writing to pagefile, that can be fixed with a much cheaper and safer RAM upgrade.

 

if you have the bucks...Intel Extreme Edition Processor but go with the 6 core model...thats all I can suggest, since I run a crappy E8600 Processor dual core with no hyper threading on it lol

 

I read that your motherboard will do 140w CPUs. Check this out..

http://support.asus.com/cpusupport/...hair IV Formula&os=&hashedid=kPGmtxee5RsQVsXG

If you could get an FX-8120 or 8150, that would be worth it. It has a lot of cache ( 8MB L2 / 8MB L3 ).

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1308191&CatId=7341

This page says " Note: AMD FX Processors require an AMD 9-Series motherboard with socket AM3+; these processors are not backward compatible with previous generation motherboards. "

I don't really know what they mean by 9-Series motherboard.. but if they mean the first number in the chipset, then your's is an 8-Series ( AMD 890FX ).

I can see why you're not sure about what the Crosshair Formula supports..

 

he never said an upgrade to increase game performance. but ok.

yes they have a limited lifetime... of 200-400 terabytes of sequentially written data: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7173/...w-120gb-250gb-500gb-750gb-1tb-models-tested/3

you can very easily install your operating system and whatever key programs on a small SSD and then keep large files / downloads / storage on a hard drive.

also, ssd's are not about raw transfer speed. they're about the *near instantaneous* access time. try one out, hard drives are no comparison.

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i suggested an SSD instead of an actual processor because the 1090t that he already has is damn close in performance to even an 8350. the 9xxx series of amd processors are a complete waste of money. amd 'fixed' the instruction decode bottleneck present in the bulldozer/steamroller architecture but it only increased ipc by ~9% - not sure why anyone would suggest them with their huge price tag.

the OP should save up money and buy an intel motherboard + processor - nothing that AMD has out is a cost efficient upgrade, and they won't be releasing any new desktop-oriented processors for at least a year or more.

 

maybe not, but he DID say an upgrade for his cpu, it's even right in the thread title

Meaningful upgrade for my cpu

 

read full posts please

 

I didn't think I'd need to go to pedantics, a cpu upgrade and the following I figured would imply i wanted to upgrade my CPU, not optimize my hardware setup.

 

i did, and your post is still invalid, as the fx-8320 is 30% better in performance than the op's current cpu, which is quite a bit

 

$180 for a 20% upgrade in single thread performance if we ignore overclocking. lots of people claim the 1090t has a higher performance in single threaded tasks, but i'm not seeing it in benchmarks. note: upgrading to a $200 haswell i5 processor is a ~100% upgrade. http://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/331/AMD_FX-Series_FX-8350_vs_AMD_Phenom_II_X6_1090T.html

it would be an okayish upgrade if all he did every day was encode videos or other tasks that perfectly utilize all 8 cores. he would see little to no performance gain in most games. it's almost the same processor with an extra module (two cores) thrown in.

assuming he doesn't run into any motherboard issues trying to use a newer AMD processor in his very old motherboard (which google seems to indicate he could), is it really worth it? i personally think upgrading to another AMD processor when you already have a 1090t is a waste of money. it is rarely cost efficient to buy a new processor that still works on your current motherboard socket.

i guess i'll be the only person in this thread who thinks OP should save his money and put it towards buying hardware that is a cost efficient upgrade when he's able to. i don't see why anyone would upgrade by your supposed 30% when moores law has held true for quite a while now.

 

*cough*beamng*cough* would use all 8 cores if the op ever wanted to get 8 vehicles loaded in-game at once

 

I'm a physics and simulation junkie, quite a bit more than BeamNG would benefit, which is why I ended up with my current processor and not say... an i5

Besides, its not like I'll be in a position to upgrade in the near future. I wanna beef up my system as much as possible before I lose the ability to prop up the costly parts. I can drop a hundred odd quid on a processor, stick the full 16gb of RAM in and chuck another hard drive in here. Can more than spare the money right now so I'm upgrading slightly the various things I enjoy, my PC being one of them, to eek a little bit more time out of them.