In reply to a post by epyon:

every current gen AMD cpu is lackluster.

Not in terms of gaming they aren't. The on board graphics of the AMD will easily outperform the i3 6100.

If he doesn't want to buy a discrete GPU straight off, the APU is a far more sensible bet. Waiting for Zen will likely not fit his budget either. It's a £300 budget...

http://www.pcmag.com/review/344884/intel-core-i3-6100

In reply to a post by astateoftrance:

Thanks, that is interesting. I am definitely open to going for AMD, all my desktops I have bought/built so far have used their chips.

Excellent comparisons here, utilising the on board graphics, and after the addition of a discrete card.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10543/the-skylake-core...

The on board performance is leagues ahead with the AMD graphics cores. Once you add a GPU the i3 does better, but not as significantly.

So if you want good visuals from the outset, and don't mind being (just) in second place if you upgrade to discrete, AMD is by far the better bang for buck, particularly on your specified budget. I suppose you have to ask yourself, when would you be looking to upgrade CPU after that?

If sooner rather than later, waiting for Zen or for an i5 price drop would be your best bet, but not in line with your budget trance!

I think its a fair assumption he will be using a discrete GPU.

The idea to wait for zen is sound, zen looks like it will be a good improvement and its very likely it will be noticebly cheaper than what intel offers. So to say it will be unaffordable I think is odd as there has been no speculation on pricing. But even if he still goes with older gen AMD post zen release it is probable it will be cheaper than it is now.

I still say he should go with the i3, but the second choice would be waiting for zen.

If I had an AMD chip then I would be suffering from cpu bottleneck in some games.

GTA5 - already bottlenecks my 4.3ghz haswell in cities when I have max population set.
Project cars hits circa 80-85% usage and is known to slow down and bottleneck on AMD systems.
FPS games do much better, and tend to not be so reliant on IPC.
JRPG's are the worst, they tend to have very poor or non existant multi core capabilities so is usual to have one core heavily loaded with the rest idle.

Our different views are now probably confusing the poor guy But I think if not set on intel its wise to wait for ZEN to be released.

Our different views are now probably confusing the poor guy

He doesn't strike me as some shrinking violet. I'm sure he'll cope and not just take what he reads here as gospel!

From the link I posted:

GTA V 1080p very high settings A10 7890k discrete 290X, concedes only 5 frames to the i3 6100

In the meantime whilst running on integrated graphics (as he quite clearly states he intends to do) the i3 6100 posts 30fps to the 7890k's 55fps.

As both are running mid forties at 1080p very high settings with a discrete GPU, 5fps is not going to be that noticeable. 25fps is a huge difference whilst running on integrated.

I think you need to accept that he's not spending enough money for Intel to force home any really palpable advantage. Some games will favour the i3, some won't. If he had £600 to spend I would agree with you without hesitation.

As for Zen, it certainly won't be cheaper than the 7890k, and the mobo will likely cost a bit more too.

I did some playtesting on gta5 today as the first time I ran it on my gtx 1070. Boy this game is demanding. It is the first game where my 1070 cannot play at ease 1440p maxed out. Also some info here which may help others when considering antialiasing vs higher resolutions. I made a similar post regarding AA vs pixel count on ocuk when discussing 4k on ps4.

On the settings I was using on my gtx 970 (which for many of the settings was one below maximum, grass on medium) The card was at about 90% utilisation in the most demanding areas and sustaining 60fps when cpu was not bottlenecking. I then disabled the extra draw distance in advanced graphics setting (they hurt the cpu badly) and I could just about sustain 60fps in city areas with max population density and traffic still enabled. cpu cores were hovering 80-85% in city.

However I got annoyed with all the shimmering affects on edges, which I think is a problem that gets worse at higher resolutions, sure enough when I dropped to 720p most of shimmering disappeared albeit replaced with fuzzyness and not so sharp graphics. e.g. things like cable's will be thinner on a higher resolution screen so jagged edges and so forth will be more apparent. The problm is when in motion e.g. when driving things like cables can appear to be disappearing due to the shimmer affect and edges of buildings and even cars in front of you have a weird affect, I tried downsampling to no avail, FXAA near useless, MSAA worked, but MSAA on top of 1440p = ouch. I could only get it satisfactory with MSAA 4x, 2X helps but not enough for my liking. But my 1070 cannot keep up at 60fps with 1440p and MSAA 4x. So I then enabled nvidia's MFAA and now I get 4xMSAA quality with the setting at 2x. With 2xMSAA setting tho the card is very close to its limits typically 85%+ and will go over 95% in most demanding areas, but just about holds on. This is still without ultra asettings, most stuff one below the highest. Although I now set shadows and tessellation to max as I was getting annoying pop ins. This overloaded the card again so I dropped to 1200p. The card at 1200p with the settings now never goes above 80% and is usually close to 65%. At 1200p it looks very good still and definitely better than 1440p with no MSAA. So it shows at least in my view pixel count is inferior to other options when a choice has to be made.

Another game I play tales of zesteria, I play at 1440p with 4xSGSSAA, I tried 4k downsampling alongside no antialiasing, again 1440p with 4xSGSSAA beats 4k, even 1080p with 4xSGSSAA beats 4k.

If he is using integrated GPU then yeah go for AMD. Although I would only consider that a stop gap measure.

Edited by Chrysalis (Thu 27-Oct-16 08:08:47)

Thanks for all the advice and links guys, I lot of great information there to think about

It might be a while before I get a GPU (if I do that is) but I wouldn't necessarily want to be playing any games before then. I just wanted the option of turning it into a gaming PC.
Don't think I can wait for the new ZEN CPU's as my current PC is dying. So the choice is between current AMD and Intel.

Another option I am mulling over is sticking with my current case, HDD and pushing the budget to a i5-6400 which are £158 on Amazon.

Just upgrade and get a Playstation Pro ...Far easier ,i once pondered in getting a PC again but within a week or so when i thought about the likely amount i would spend i quickly came to my senses based on been sort of an idle gamer who likes simplicity.

I wouldn't be happy with a budget PC and i dare say i would have spent a small fortune on a very decent high end gaming PC,and possibly within a few weeks it would be sitting on the office desk while i much preferred to sit in my living room playing either my Xbox One S or my Playstation Pro,playing games like The Last Guardian ,Watchdogs 2 and a host of others.

Edited by time2die (Thu 27-Oct-16 09:22:43)

My gaming PC is an i7 with 16GB RAM and dual SSD in raid configuration with a large spinning disk for storage. I haven't turned it on in ages. Did play Skyrim on it for a while last winter but got bored - and haven't played the playstation much either (you won't be surprised to hear that I got bored with No Man's Sky).

Yeah No Mans Sky the least said the better, possibly the most over hyped ,over rated game in a very long time,i literally gave up within 30 minutes never to load the so called game again which has been quickly chucked into a darkened container to get traded for more than likely peanuts when i get the chance to visit the dreaded Game shop when I'm in the town.

What a awful game it is and what a complete and utter bore, doing the same thing over and over again, never been this disappointed since Duke Puke Em Forever