Gamers: Do You Need More Than An Athlon II X3?

totally agree!! and if you got lucky you'll get a quad core for it

Why not just use an AMD board with the 790/890FX chipset?

Don! The question you ask does not match the summary. You ask: "Do You Need More Than An Athlon II X3?" and you answer: "To summarize, the Athlon II X3 440 is an excellent budget gaming processor..." Whats up with that, it doesn't take a genius to understand that the X3 is a budget processor, and you dedicated hours upon hours to come to this conclusion, like what the hell did you run out of time or thoughts or did you forget at half way what you set out to accomplish?. Also for the GPU you chose a card that a typical budget gamer would not buy, the 5850 is just too expensive to be paired with the x3. A 5750 would have been a much better fit.

I'd actually quite like to see this as gaming performance with some other applications running, I think a lot of us play while we have a web browser, maybe some IM program and possibly an excel sheet also running in the back ground. While few games benefit from more than 3 cores when nothing else is running, few people have the luxury of a dedicated games only PC... When you get all that going, I suspect the higher spec CPU and more memory would improve performance a lot.

This " When it comes to gaming, though, the CPU can only do so much; the graphics subsystem is key. We've received some feedback on the forums suggesting that our recommendation of any processor more expensive than the Athlon II X3 440 is frivolous." seems to be the basis for doing a more in depth if somewhat flawed follow up to this http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/core [...] 31852.html Which i felt was more realistic.
This article seems to be going out of its way to prove a point which it misses due to its use of unrealistic hardware pairings.
The point made in the forums, which i am an active member of is that as soon as some one posts regarding FPS or asks about a "bottleneck", there is always some idiot that says "yea your E7500 is crap you need an i7 which is total rubbish.
Of course you will get more FPS but is it worth the extra money for 15 more FPS when you have 50 anyway sensible answer is no it isn't.

@ mactronix

I see your point and anyone whos buys an i7 purely for gaming is not seeing a markable difference in fps, but the majority of people who can afford an i7 rig or i5 for that matter will be using the cpu for a wide variety of tasks not just gaming as I think this is just a waste of a great cpu.

I have an AMD 1055T and when I purchased it I did so knowing that most benchmarks show it losing out to the 965be in some games, however as a complete solution it is great and after overclocking it, nows it's amazing.

I would like to think that people research the web before they make a cpu purchase which if your going i7 can be over £250, spending that much purely on a gaming rig just doesn't make sense in the current economic climate. We are very fortunate in the western world to be able to spend lots on our pc components, others who are not, have to cut their cloth accordingly and the athlon II x3 440 is simply one of the best budget cpus on the market.

It strikes me that the article sets out its stall sensibly then destroys itself when it puts up average frame rates.

Who cares if you run at 200fps for 80% if you run at 20fps for the other 20%?

Why not apply v-sync and cap all frame rates at 60 then work out the average? We are not looking at graphic card power, but user experience. This would have made the averages much closer in lower resolutions and been more representative of how the competing systems perform.

In fact, when comparing two systems why isn't this done? I can entirely understand why not when comparing two graphics cards, but surely for a system as a whole it is much better than minimum frame rates which might only account for 2% of gameplay.

Relax. You're not paying to see this article.

@ alatheia00

I agree with you. What yanks my chain is when someone tells another poster that they need an i5 or i7 as an upgrade when they don't.

Starting from scratch then an I5/i7 makes perfect sense, but upgrading to one for a few extra FPS is such a stupid suggestion when you look at the out lay in money terms for what you will get in FPS terms.

If you don't have the budget for it then your not loosing that much going with the athlon II x3 440. As someone said above, your not in all honesty going to pair it with a 5850/5870 in the real world anyway now are you.

Hmm... maybe I missed it in the article but where is the price point chart, FPS for $$$ ratio?

$125 for the AMD CPU/AM3 mobo

$425 for the i7 CPU/mobo

The Intel setuo costs more than 3 times the AMD. So pay more than 300% more for a performance gain of 15%??

I'm a bit confused as to what you are trying to achieve with this article. Yes the X3 is a great budget cpu but pairing it with a gfx card (or worse 2) that is over three times its price is just stupid. Also running any game at more than 1900x1200 with a budget cpu and even a mid range gfx card isn't something most people will be doing, especially if they are doing a budget build.

I think you've lost the run of yourselves with this article. compare the X3 with a i3 or even an older quad and you show how good it is bang for buck. Asking it to drive a crossfire system at 2560x res is just stupid.

Anyone reading this without much of a clue will think "omg, I can't get a X3 because it only gives 9fps even with a huge crossfire system that I'll never be able to afford. Man that cpu sucks. Guess I mortgage my soul and get an i7"

@ RonanH

"Guess I mortgage my soul and get an i7" lol I just jumped in the roflcopter with that one.

I like this article, although I agree that most of us won't be pairing an HD5850 with the X3. But I am not sure a lesser card would show where CPU bottlenecking might occur. Which is something people would definitely ask for.

I also agree that a bang for buck chart like ones used in SBM would be highly useful here.

The i7 is, was and will be for a looooooong time, a complete waste of a gamer's money. I hope all you guys that bought i7's for gaming are enjoying a combination of implied bragging rights and poverty while AMD gamers like me laugh at you VERY VERY hard as we use the money we saved for a nice vacation in the Dominican for a week! LOL

I am of course referring to the Phenom II series, not the Athlon II series although even then, the Athlon II is still probably a better buy! As one person pointed out:
"Get an i7 and pay 300% for a 15% increase."

Good on ya, Intel fanboys! MUAHAHAHAHA!!

As for the article, yeah, you completely lost your direction here. If you ask a question, you must give an answer to it and you haven't. If this was a university essay you'd be looking at a mark of 55%-60% tops.

LOLOLOLLO I TROLL U.

AMD fanboy faggotry aside, buying an i7 for gaming is (to a degree) a waste of money at the moment, but then you could argue that it'll be usable with future applications for a longer period of time then a Phenom II, which you will most likely feel the need to replace slightly sooner.

Buying a cpu is alot to do with pyschology, let me explain for the less adept researchers, joe public they will purchase or aspire to purchase whatever is the most expensive sometimes they don't even know why themselves. I guess its to do with the idea that the price of a product is set at the real value of that product, anybody who has read one or two pages and has half a brain knows that not always the case
When I set out to buy a pc, I couldn't help but look at i7 cpu's even though I am a long term fanboy of amd I try and get the best bang for my buck at any price point and I almost fooled myself into thinking, "yes lower tdp more throughput i will make my money back in no time with increased productivity", but back to reality I just could not justify the price of the i7 975 and AMD are guilty of the same practices along time ago when they had the chip lead they had ridiculous prices aswell.
I read somewhere always wait 6 months after the release of a component before you purchase for a variety of reasons which i am sure all of you guys are aware of, but is it just me or are component prices not going down at all and sometimes they are going in the opposite direction, I know this has to do with market forces supply demand etc but surely some of the i7 range should be priced more competitively I mean how greedy can one company be.

Agreed. It should result in a performance boost, even if it's only slight.

I don't understand why you are all slating this article. The question was: the AMD chip is great, but is it all to do with the graphics card, or if you have a better/more expensive CPU, does it have an impact on gaming?

And they answered this question: yes the AMD chip is pretty good, but for extra performance, the Intel chip provides it. A little unneccessary extra performance at the moment, but it still provides more.

Ok, some of their examples were a bit extreme. I admit pairing a pair of top end cards at ultra high resolution with a budget cpu is unlikely - but that's the whole point of the article! Should we keep with our cheap and pretty good AMD cpus and buy top end graphics cards, or should we upgrade the CPU to get better gaming rigs. Well they answered the question for me.

As a working teacher, I'd give this essay much higher than 50/60%.

On occasion, Crossfire doesn't yield any tangible performance increase, and rarely, even decreases performance, especially so on AMD platforms. Strange, but it happens.

SLi, on the other hand, seems to scale pretty well. I wouldn't mind seeing a follow-up using nVidia equivalents and, as touched on before, on an FX board.