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This is an age old battle isn’t it ? There are a whole lot of guys who ‘prefer’ and ‘recommend’ Intel processors and why not, these are some of the best in the market. AMD on the other hand, I atleast haven’t seen a lot of them except my school machines running on AMD Sempron. So let’s dig more into AMD vs Intel battle.
The Dilemma – AMD vs Intel
Well, I ‘was’ also someone who always preferred Intel. My all the systems till date – my 2 desktops, my laptop – all being managed by the Intel processor. My latest one (2011 purchase) being Intel Core i5-760 2.8 GHz (Discontinued now) This processor has some of the best specification. With 4 physical cores and 8MB cache, the processor has never let me down. And had only reached 100% once while rendering/encoding Full HD movie.
But something went wrong with my motherboard, and now I have to replace it. I asked my online pals for suggestions. And this is the one where I always head for ‘good’ advice. I as usual wanted to buy the latest processor in the market and was keen on purchasing the Intel Core i3 4130 3.0 GHz. This Haswell fourth gen processor was ‘certainly’ a downgrade from the my previous i5. And for the same reason, I was suggested to try out the AMD FX 6300. This AMD processor is an upgrade over my i5 on the specifications and the performance part. While the latter had 4 physical cores and 4 threads, the former one has 6 physical cores and threads. I know, its not all about clock speeds, the performance is what that really matters. According to various resources, the outcome was, when on a tight budget and seek high performance, go for AMD. So this is where the AMD processor wins in the AMD vs Intel battle.
Here is one the benchmarks I took to compare the Intel i3 4130 and AMD FX 6300. The AMD proccy had a lot to in the single threaded applications as the Intel processor was way better in processing those. But when it came to multithreaded applications, it was AMD that got the better off the two. Even the cache memory in AMD vs Intel, AMD was more compared to the Intel.
According to the price point of view, the Intel i3-4130 costs around 7500Rs at Nehru Place, New Delhi while the AMD FX 6300 costs around 7000Rs. (So price is not really a big difference)
So why am I considering AMD ?
First of all, all these points below are based on comparison with Intel core i3-4130. Because of my tight budget, this is the one Intel processor which fits in the budget. So here I go:
- It is certainly an “upgrade” over my previous Intel i5 760 with the former having 4 physical cores and threads while AMD having 6 physical cores and threads. I wouldn’t want to downgrade to a dual core 4th gen processor at about the same price.
- It is an unlocked processor, meaning I can overclock it. (I won’t be certainly trying that) The i3 doesn’t have turbo boost, while the AMD can clock upto 4.0 GHz.
- The socket type – AM3+ is supported by the Phenom II series(2008-2012), Athlon II series(2009-present) and FX Series(2011-present) which clears shows, the motherboard once purchased can last longer as we can ‘expect’ the future CPUs to support the socket while having backward compatibility. Socket AM3+ CPUs can be used with socket AM3.
- The motherboard with AM3+ socket has many options as compared to the similar Intel 1150 boards. The boards support RAID, SATA 6Gbps ports, ATI CrossFire, IDE HDD support for almost the same price and LGA 1150 motherboard which doesnt support RAID, CrossFire.
- Future Proof –kindof- as most of the high end games and applications which are multi-threaded will be served well by the processor due to its multi core and multi thread capability.
So, I guess that’s pretty much it. This might well be my first AMD based setup. The specifications seem appealing and the multi threaded, multi tasking application processing ability. And most importantly, things fit well in my budget. The intel processor made me exceed a little bit though.
AMD FX 6300 and ASUS M5A78L together with 4GB RAM, ATI HD 6670 1 GB DDR5 GPU will certainly make a good high- performance system.
Thanks to my friend for helping my out through this ‘tough-time’ and ThinkDigit online community to help me decide. The next post will the pictures of my purchase !! 😛 Stay tuned
[Here’s the AMD FX6300 review]
