Question:
AMD Build.. Good or Bad?
konrad o
2013-09-02 10:10:42 UTC
RAIDMAX Seiran ATX-902WW White Steel / Plastic ATX Mid
Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM003 1TB
GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD3 AM3+ AMD 990FX
EVGA 02G-P4-3658-KR GeForce GTX 650 Ti BOOST
G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB)
AMD FX-8320 Vishera 3.5GHz (4.0GHz Turbo)
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-bit
CORSAIR Hydro Series H80i Water Cooler
Five answers:
nxtfari
2013-09-03 22:33:05 UTC
Power is imbalanced between the processor and GPU, you won't like this build very much. Quick refresher course, I'll copy/paste an answer I gave someone else asking for the lowdown on bottlenecks:



Here's the deal: processors do extremely little in gaming. All they handle is game logic, AI, sound and physics on occasion, a few other tiny things, and the game's executable itself. Almost all of the heavy lifting is done by the graphics card. Textures, lighting, effects, models, animations, everything relating to what you see on the screen is done by the GPU. For this reason, its extremely difficult to bottleneck a processor. And even then, the performance hit is not as big as a graphics card bottleneck.

Think about it, a processor bottleneck is when the processor is solving basic physic/sound/logic problems so slowly that the graphics card has to wait for it to finish before it can show the frame. You can imagine how difficult this may be for any processor made in the last few years. These are miracle chips, able to do millions and billions of calculations per second, being held up by a few small problems? Not likely.

This is the reason why you see super budget builds pouring every last cent into the graphics card while keeping processors as old and slow as the Phenom II X4 and IB Pentium; they're still powerful enough to do the calculations needed in gaming with relative ease. You'll only begin to see a bottleneck with very powerful graphics cards, something along the lines of an HD 7950 or a GTX 770.

Now take a look at the GPU side of the problem. Textures, lighting, models, animations, and effects are hard work. Even when split between the thousands of cores on a single GPU, loading it all, transforming and manipulating it, refining it, and adding the finishing touches and filters all in under 1/60 of a second is a daunting task. And to do while responding to your erratic, unpredictable input relentlessly for as long as you play (that's upwards of 216,000 frames per hour)... you can imagine how difficult it is to be a graphics card.

For a small analogy, liken the two as the director and engine of a train, respectively. The engine is the one doing all of the hard work pushing the train. The director simply tells it what to do and where to go. Having just an okayish director is fine, as long as he can conduct properly, he'll usually tell the train where to go before its waiting on him to make a turn or whatever. When you see people on here complaining of a processor overkill (dropping an FX-8350 or i7-4770k into a build with an HD 7870 or GTX 760) it's like putting a world-class competitive-train director into an old beat-up passenger train. No matter how good he is, it's not going to make the train go any faster. He's still waiting on the engine to move the train.

Similarly, you can imagine how hard it is to bottleneck a processor. you would need a fantastically fast bullet train for just your average director to say "**** it, this thing is too fast for me." That's when you call in the world-class competitive-train director who can handle something built for insane speeds.

Bottlenecks are weird things, and the split of GPU of CPU power is not always as ideal as people would like to imagine. A 50/50 split of power is the most well rounded, but that doesn't always translate into real-world results. You have to keep an eye on things that are more important than others.



Anyway, an 8320 paired with a GTX 650 ti BOOST is, to put it bluntly, terrible. Here we have a situation of a world-class conductor in a beat up and shoddy old passenger car. The GPU is holding it back, and the 8320 can't do a thing about it. What I would recommend is swapping the 8320 for a much cheaper FX-6300 (similar performance, most games/programs can hardly make use of four cores, forget about six or eight). Take that extra money and spend it on a nicer GPU. Look for the GTX 770 and Radeon 7950. If you can't afford either of these, then at the VERY LEAST get a GTX 760 or Radeon 7870. Otherwise, it's worth cutting further into your build (FX-4300/Phenom II X$ if we must) to attain them.
C-Man
2013-09-04 05:06:05 UTC
Looks good, although yeah, you need a PSU.



I agree with Danny, if your budget allows then swap the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost for a Radeon HD 7870 or GeForce GTX 660.



http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Zotac/GeForce_GTX_650_Ti_Boost/9.html

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2013/03/26/nvidia-geforce-gtx-650-ti-boost-2gb-review/4
Danny
2013-09-02 19:38:11 UTC
Looks fine to me. I would switch out the 650ti boost for a 7870. They're only about $20 more at this point, if even that.
?
2013-09-03 01:34:32 UTC
Pretty good
?
2013-09-02 18:51:03 UTC
PSU?


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