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[Heron TSG]

Mildly off-topic, but what sort of practical differences are there between AMD and Intel CPUs? I have an AMD FX6350 processor that has 6 cores at 3.90 GHz. I decided on it mostly because I heard it was roughly as good as the Intel equivalent except about half the price.

[Evaris]

What manufacturer should I buy the graphics card from, though? O.o

Personally I like Sapphire, HIS, and Powercolor. 

When it comes to outright performance for the price though, if you're in the USA and shop online, HIS is the way to go right now with sales: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161442

[Skyrunner]

I'm in Korea. Also, is that profile pic from Mabinogi?

[Evaris]

I'm in Korea. Also, is that profile pic from Mabinogi?

Ah.  Well, brands are still the thing.
  And yep, it is from mabinogi. (my character, specifically)  Sadly nowhere near as popular here in the USA as it is overseas.  Really hoping to see sword art online content sometime in the future as well as the Ninja stuff Mabi Japan has, but knowing Nexon NA, probably won't. 

Sorry for the off topic mini-rant. 

[Tellemurius]

Mildly off-topic, but what sort of practical differences are there between AMD and Intel CPUs? I have an AMD FX6350 processor that has 6 cores at 3.90 GHz. I decided on it mostly because I heard it was roughly as good as the Intel equivalent except about half the price.

AMD complicated the circuitry in order to run parallel threads with an increase to available resources to each thread. This unfortunately tanked their clock performance along side Intel. Intel had nearly doubled the same performance from their previous generation and destroys AMD for single threaded applications. AMD will never be able to match clock-to-clock with Intel with the current generation, you would need to do heavy overclocking to get close enough. Being said, beyond the 6300 series the performance is good enough for gaming, its your last bottleneck before GPU and RAM and Storage.

[Evaris]

Mildly off-topic, but what sort of practical differences are there between AMD and Intel CPUs? I have an AMD FX6350 processor that has 6 cores at 3.90 GHz. I decided on it mostly because I heard it was roughly as good as the Intel equivalent except about half the price.

AMD complicated the circuitry in order to run parallel threads with an increase to available resources to each thread. This unfortunately tanked their clock performance along side Intel. Intel had nearly doubled the same performance from their previous generation and destroys AMD for single threaded applications. AMD will never be able to match clock-to-clock with Intel with the current generation, you would need to do heavy overclocking to get close enough. Being said, beyond the 6300 series the performance is good enough for gaming, its your last bottleneck before GPU and RAM and Storage.

First off, Intel hasn't made such a leap and bound of twice as fast an improvement - we've been seeing 10-15% improvements yearly by Intel in terms of IPC.   And for a matchup, Kaveri is about as fast in terms of instructions per clock as Intel's Ivy bridge platform, so that's what, two generations behind? 

[Tellemurius]

Mildly off-topic, but what sort of practical differences are there between AMD and Intel CPUs? I have an AMD FX6350 processor that has 6 cores at 3.90 GHz. I decided on it mostly because I heard it was roughly as good as the Intel equivalent except about half the price.

AMD complicated the circuitry in order to run parallel threads with an increase to available resources to each thread. This unfortunately tanked their clock performance along side Intel. Intel had nearly doubled the same performance from their previous generation and destroys AMD for single threaded applications. AMD will never be able to match clock-to-clock with Intel with the current generation, you would need to do heavy overclocking to get close enough. Being said, beyond the 6300 series the performance is good enough for gaming, its your last bottleneck before GPU and RAM and Storage.

First off, Intel hasn't made such a leap and bound of twice as fast an improvement - we've been seeing 10-15% improvements yearly by Intel in terms of IPC.   And for a matchup, Kaveri is about as fast in terms of instructions per clock as Intel's Ivy bridge platform, so that's what, two generations behind? 

Intel did with their new transistors and the Ring Bus Cache, IPC wise it was only a 10% coming from bloomfield to Sandy Bridge but it was a large change done for efficiency sake in the architecture before performance started to stagnated. AMD's Bulldozer had sputtered even against the aging Phoenom2 at launch. As for the Kaveri APU, the Steamroller architecture did fix some issues with Bulldozer and AMD has acknowledged (and pushed for sale) that the performance can finally match an i3 or low-end i5. Specifically they found the mobile 35w to match up the intel counterpart of 17w but is that really a win? Bulldozer is still garbage, its a very inefficient architecture, AMD knows it full well which is why they have not released a Steamroller CPU for this year and are waiting for their new architecture release next year completely dumping this Pentium 4 remake.

[Evaris]

Mildly off-topic, but what sort of practical differences are there between AMD and Intel CPUs? I have an AMD FX6350 processor that has 6 cores at 3.90 GHz. I decided on it mostly because I heard it was roughly as good as the Intel equivalent except about half the price.

AMD complicated the circuitry in order to run parallel threads with an increase to available resources to each thread. This unfortunately tanked their clock performance along side Intel. Intel had nearly doubled the same performance from their previous generation and destroys AMD for single threaded applications. AMD will never be able to match clock-to-clock with Intel with the current generation, you would need to do heavy overclocking to get close enough. Being said, beyond the 6300 series the performance is good enough for gaming, its your last bottleneck before GPU and RAM and Storage.

First off, Intel hasn't made such a leap and bound of twice as fast an improvement - we've been seeing 10-15% improvements yearly by Intel in terms of IPC.   And for a matchup, Kaveri is about as fast in terms of instructions per clock as Intel's Ivy bridge platform, so that's what, two generations behind? 

Intel did with their new transistors and the Ring Bus Cache, IPC wise it was only a 10% coming from bloomfield to Sandy Bridge but it was a large change done for efficiency sake in the architecture before performance started to stagnated. AMD's Bulldozer had sputtered even against the aging Phoenom2 at launch. As for the Kaveri APU, the Steamroller architecture did fix some issues with Bulldozer and AMD has acknowledged (and pushed for sale) that the performance can finally match an i3 or low-end i5. Specifically they found the mobile 35w to match up the intel counterpart of 17w but is that really a win? Bulldozer is still garbage, its a very inefficient architecture, AMD knows it full well which is why they have not released a Steamroller CPU for this year and are waiting for their new architecture release next year completely dumping this Pentium 4 remake.

Well something to keep in mind is the bulldozer architecture was meant to be more than anything an answer to Intel's Hyperthreading.  And it's not as bad as the Pentium 4 as far as how far behind they fell on instructions per clock in all honesty.  We also have to keep in mind that AMD is a die-shrink behind as well given they have to go through 3rd party manufactures and Intel is cutting edge as far as fabs are concerned.  node-to-node size they're decent, AMD's last 32nm chip was about 5-10% slower than Intel's last 32nm chip, and AMD's current 28nm chip (most of which's added space is given to even more for the GPU side for the GCN cores.) is about the same speed as said Ivy Bridge chip.  Not as bad as we were seeing back in the P4/athalon days where we had die-to-die comparisons with the athalon being at times easily 30% faster clock-for-clock. 

[Tellemurius]

Even with the fabrication issues, AMD pushed in Vishera with Piledriver which did fix up some of the pipeline issues but still couldn't match 32nm Sandy and their final answer was releasing those ridiculous FX-9000s that pushed their clocks upto 5Ghz with a 200w+ TDP, my brother had a 8320 and that was a space heater in his room.

For Kaveri,the 28nm fab is not core efficient. Yes the density increased but the tradeoff was that AMD kept the TDPs down, they couldn't cram another computation unit to boost the GPU or increase the clock speeds over from Richland. At least they pushed their memory controllers to run at high clocks so the GPU didn't choked much from the memory bottleneck.
Honestly, I can't wait for a Kaveri laptop, AMD can definitely kill if they can get some manufacturers behind them. It may not match up against a full i7 and dedicated graphics but definitely cheaper for the inbetween as i don't want the stupid gutted ULVs or the pricey full processors+dedicated graphics.

Ever since Intel jumped to 22nm OCing spits out alot more heat and didn't help that they used a cheap TPM that made it very hard to push over 4GHz with the Ivys and Haswell (Devils Canyon doesn't count cause it was catered to the OC people). With Broadwell and the future Intel is just going to continue working on the graphics and small improvements. AMD will continue with the APU for the graphics and security along with hopefully a vastly better architecture reveal for next year.

[Skyrunner]

I have a new dilemma.

I can only purchase the following brands for the AMD R9 270x:

XFX, 2 GB or 4 GB
PowerColor 2 GB
Gigabyte 2 GB



Which one?! (the 4 GB model is about 40$ ish more expensive, I think, at $300).

[gimlet]

What resolution is your monitor?  If it's *really* hi-res, that's when you want the most memory on the graphics card if you want to run games at hi-res at decent FPS.  Look for benchmarks of the games you want to run, at your resolutions.

That being said, 2G is probably plenty (unless you have spent $$$ on uber monitors).

[Skyrunner]

I have two 1920x1080 monitors, does that count as uber? o_O


Edit: I wish I had the PSU to run an even better card, but I guess I'll have to go with the 270x. >_> I'm torn between Sapphire and MSI for their 2GB model.

[Thief^]

Not really. Uber is 4k these days, but that costs a small fortune.

That said, a 1080p image is only 8MB (uncompressed, which it would be for the render output of a graphics card). Even with ludicrous texture overkill in 3D games you shouldn't need an insane amount. I'm pretty much certain 4GB is pointless for a graphics card for gaming.

EDIT: Found some tests to back me up: http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Video-Card-Performance-2GB-vs-4GB-Memory-154/

[Skyrunner]

Cool, now I just need to choose a manufacturer and I'm all set.

I'm sad that GPUs here cost about 10% more than on Newegg

[Thief^]

Can't go wrong with Gigabyte.

Although really, your best bet is checking the warranty time and that it's actually valid in korea. You want your card to *work* after all.