AMD FX-6100 vs AMD phenom II x4 980

It's really a tough choice. On one hand, the 980 is basically end of the line for its architecture but on the otherhand, it's trading blows even against the 8150 in many benchmarks & better in more games.
But I think both cpu will not be a bottleneck in most modern games so you can go with either. I myself will go for the 6100 just for being the newer architecture, having more "cores" appearing in task manager & being 95w compared to 125 for the 980. But such choice is only based on the 2 options. I will not go for either if Intel in included in the option.

The 980 hands down. Heck even for multitasking the 4 core will probably beat the 6 core. The bulldozers are only 80% efficient per core for multitasking so take 80%*6 and you get 480% so yeah. Most of the time programs only use 4 cores or less so lets just say forget about the 6 core. If anything i would probably Save the money and get a 4110 and a 212+ and overclock it to the max. But hey it's up To you.

http://www.tomshardware.com/pictur [...] anium.html
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-Bruce

crap, is the fx 4170 a bad cpu? lol i thought it was good because its new and 4.2 ghz

and is this benchmark review wrong?
http://www.techspot.com/review/452 [...] page7.html

FX @ 4.2GHz is beaten easily by i5 @ 3GHz so yeah it's bad. All FXs are beaten in gaming by i3 @ 3GHz to and i3s are only dual cores. Games often only use one or two threads so having 4, 6, or 8 cores isn't much help.

GHz is the clock rate and IPC is instructions per clock, ie performance per clock. Intel has a huge advantage in IPC so even at much lower frequencies an Intel i3/i5/i7 is faster than FX. Intel also has other advantages such as much better floating point performance and much lower power usage. An i3 uses less than half the power of an FX CPU while being faster for games and cheaper than most FX CPUs.

FX is okay for very well threaded applications but gaming is not well threaded so FX fails at gaming when compared to anything Intel has made in several years. Even Core 2 is better than FX and Core 2 is several years old.

If you must go AMD then a Phenom x4 BE is your best bet, preferably the 980 BE. Intel is the way to go for gaming right now. Hopefully AMD will learn to compete, but AMD officially stated that they don't plan on doing so. This might change after all it wouldn't be the first time a company did a complete 180 on a previous statement (look at HP, for a while they said they were going to leave the consumer PC market yet now they say the opposite).

go for the x4 980 it does better in nearly all benchmarks . i don't see any reason to get the 6100 unless windows 8 does really fix the bulldozers .