Looking for a good, budget CPU

[Flamzorz]

Hey all!

I am looking for a good CPU for gaming around the £75-£100 mark. Preferably an AMD because the board would be cheaper to buy. I am looking to buy the Board, CPU and RAM together for around £160-£200 so if an Intel is around the same price point that would be fine too.

This is what I was looking at but I would like some advice:

Thanks!

 

[Dark Scyth]

I'd honestly drop the 6 core and go with a 4 core. You really don't need more than 4 cores unless you get into 3D rendering (Programs like Maya.etc). For CPU if you want AMD I would go for the FX 4170 which is 4.2GHz Quad Core or the FX 4300 which is a 3.8GHz Quad Core (It's a little less than the 4170 but get a decent cooler for the CPU and work about with overclocking) and runs off of the Piledriver architecture rather than Bulldozer which is what the 4170 runs on. Piledriver is a little more efficient per watt and a little more efficient per cycle clock than Bulldozer. Chances are you'll see better performance by getting a Quad Core than you would with 6 or more cores, so I would definitely stick with 4 cores.

For RAM I would with another manufacture, something like Corsair but that's more of a personal preference. I would also pick a motherboard that supports up to 32GB rather than only 16GB. Also more preference than anything but would be nice depending if you have upgrading in mind later on.

Any particular thing you want it for, you said gaming but what about emulation? Other things like that.

 

[Flamzorz]

No, I wouldn't emulate anything other than old games like 16 bit so I don't think that would be a problem. Shortly after I posted this I actually shopped around abit more and came up with this:

However, I will look into that quad core you mentioned.

Thanks!

 

[Dark Scyth]

Like I said with Six Cores+ they really are only meant for rendering, chances are you will see performance decreases compared to a quad core, some people argue it doesn't but i've seen personally that it does. If you take the time to make the cores utilize properly by setting their affinity you probably won't have that problem but I never tried those things. As far as I know, no games utilize anything with more than 4 cores and anything over 3GHz doesn't need more than 4 cores, that's for sure. I personally have a FX-4170 and it is fairly good for emulation for Wii, Gamecube, PS2 games. It needs a bit of overclocking to run some Wii games with full speeds and LLE audio though. So if you ever think about emulation of newer consoles, it's a good idea.

Have any ideas for a PSU and a Graphics card? Things like that.

 

[Flamzorz]

Well since this is just going to be a very heavy upgrade, I still have my GPU (Radeon 6770) and my HDD with Windows 7 on it. I am just upgrading the board, RAM and CPU because I have a very old board that is an AM2 CPU slot and only takes DDR2 ram so I feel it would be a great upgrade, just to get more modern components in there. My current specs are an AMD Athlon X4 640 (3ghz, Quad Core) and 4gb of DDR2 Ram. I have also already got a new case to put it in,the Cooler Master Elite 430.

 

[Dark Scyth]

Making the upgrade would definitely benefit. Do you know if your PSU can handle the extra, know how many watts it has? Chances are you won't have a problem but if it's not enough, it'll definitely effect performance.

 

[Flamzorz]

It is a 250 watt so I might get a 500 or 750 watt further down the line. I never thought about that. Thanks.