The Best CPU for the Money: Intel Core i3-6100 vs. i3-4360, i5-4430 & AMD FX-8320E

[Adhmuz]

@TechSpot , @Steve : how about fixing your mistake where you have put the FX-8320e as a quad core CPU. Either a 4 module CPU or 8 core CPU, quad core is wrong.

How about you get off your high feakin' horse and wake up and smell the crap AMD has been shoveling your way. If your going to call this piece an 8 core CPU than we should start referring to i3s with HT as quad cores? Or get back in your AMD powered cruiser and take off "AMD Fanboy Away!"

Good article, except there are many grammatical or punctuation problems, written in haste was this?

Hilarious to see how dismal the performance of the FX quad core is next to Intels entry level dual core CPUs, and to think my 6 year old i7 I purchased for $100 is still faster, and by the looks of thing always will be.

 

[deemon]

I kind of hoped this test was more like performance for money test, not take 150$ and try to find best CPU inside this price.
Like actual comparison to all i3, i5 and i7 CPU-s and not just... maybe throw in also some pentiums and AMD-s. Lets say i3 performs 100 performance and costs 150 (index = 100/150 = 0.67) and i5 performs 200 performance and costs 250 (200/250 = 0.8), would make i5 better choice. Numbers pulled out of air, but you understand where I go with this, right?

 

[SEADRIVE]

I have been running my pc with my core 2 quad q9550 for over 7 years now and decided to finally upgrade...I was going to grab an AMD, but for gaming, it would not be worth it. Before the core 2 duo's arrived, I was all AMD for years, even since my AMD socket 7 in the 90s...they were always either on par, but usually more efficient than an Intel design. However, for close to a decade now, they have not been able to pull themselves out of the hole and speed things up. So, I decided to grab a new mobo, which is decent, fast ram at 3200mhz overclocked and an i3 6100, for this seems to be the CPU for the buck. I personally don't see the i7 or i5 boot kicking AMD, for their cpu's are quite pricey, it will be the i3...a decent price and great performance with fast enough ram. AMD, it's time to turn things up a bit...I like your products and want to support you, but will not spend more for less.
cheers,
SEADRIVE

 

[SEADRIVE]

@TechSpot , @Steve : how about fixing your mistake where you have put the FX-8320e as a quad core CPU. Either a 4 module CPU or 8 core CPU, quad core is wrong.

How about you get off your high feakin' horse and wake up and smell the crap AMD has been shoveling your way. If your going to call this piece an 8 core CPU than we should start referring to i3s with HT as quad cores? Or get back in your AMD powered cruiser and take off "AMD Fanboy Away!"

Good article, except there are many grammatical or punctuation problems, written in haste was this?

Hilarious to see how dismal the performance of the FX quad core is next to Intels entry level dual core CPUs, and to think my 6 year old i7 I purchased for $100 is still faster, and by the looks of thing always will be.

I have kept my core 2 quad q9550 for all these years instead of grabbing a 4 or 8 code AMD, for under single core performance, my 7/8 year old chip still able to keep up with AMD cores...I find this ironicly disappointing actually. Also, over the years, it's really been gpu's that have made the improvements, not the cpu.

 

[Allan M Systems]

"Intel's Core i3 Still Trumps AMD's Budget Range"

After seeing the 8320E, overclocked, (which can be done for dirt cheap), keeping very close pace in most games with similarly priced i3/i5 implementations, and actually outperforming the i3/i5's in lots of real world application workloads, I find your conclusion comical at best.

Did you guys even look at your own results? Whose paying you for these conclusions?

The 8320E is a great value CPU, arguably a better value than any i3 or i5 right now unless it is being used specifically for poorly threaded compute intensive real-time workloads.

 

[HardReset]

The 8320E is a great value CPU, arguably a better value than any i3 or i5 right now unless it is being used specifically for poorly threaded compute intensive real-time workloads.

Exactly. But hey, who uses multithreaded software or even runs multiple software at same time? Test setup probably was not connected to internet and didn't have antivirus program installed. Good simulation for real world usage

 

[SEADRIVE]

I just put together a rig with the new i3 6100 and have to admit for a budget cpu, it's pretty sweet. I ran some older games that use more cpu than gpu and found the improvement over double with this cpu vs. my core 2 quad q9550. Please make sure that you use a proper mobo such as a MSI Krait and since fast ram has fallen, I have my rig with 3200 mhz ddr4. All I can say is that I was skeptical about buying an i3 instead of an i5 or i7, but for the time being I should be able to play any game 1080p with max setting. My gpu is a 280x.
Actually, I wish that instead of the low powered octa core AMD in the Xbox One and PS4, they simply shoved in this i3 instead...it would have made a great improvement.
cheers,
SEADRIVE

 

[dirtyferret]

Love these articles! Too many ***** fan boys scream about their "future proofing" quad & octa core CPUs that constantly get toasted by these intel dual cores in gaming. Keep articles like this coming

 

[Jamie Pearson]

Love these articles! Too many ***** fan boys scream about their "future proofing" quad & octa core CPUs that constantly get toasted by these intel dual cores in gaming. Keep articles like this coming

Feel free to call me an AMD fan boy, but I do think this article was rather biased. The memory bandwidth is a fair win for Intel, but the cache test is misleading because the i3 has 128KB, 512KB and 3MB of L1,L2 and L3 respectively. AMD has 384KB of L1, 8MB of L2 and 8MB of L3. It would be more sensible to compare 384KB to 512KB than 128KB, in which case the AMD wins 249.1/367.7 to 183.2.
AMD won in Cinebench.

AMD won in 4 app tests (arguably a more common use case) and the only time Intel matched it was with an i5 in phtoshop and in the single core WinRAR 5.0.

Intel won Handbrake and TMPGEnc. That said x264 was very close in pass 2 and AMD won in pass 1.

Intel's gaming performance is fantastic, it wins. If that's all you want then an i3 is perfect, but I play at 1440p so CPU bottle necking isn't to such of an issue, and when the other tests can be argued to have gone 7 to 3 in AMD's favour it is clearly not a black and white question. As are so many questions in life.

 

[cliffordcooley]

Feel free to call me an AMD fan boy, but I do think this article was rather biased.

Well after three years much has changed and this topic is now dead.

 

[Steve]

@TechSpot , @Steve : how about fixing your mistake where you have put the FX-8320e as a quad core CPU. Either a 4 module CPU or 8 core CPU, quad core is wrong.

This is funny to look back on in 2019

 

[neeyik]

This is funny to look back on in 2019

The whole Bulldozer architecture and its offspring is funny to look back on now. Credit to AMD to stubbornly sticking to the design for so long; more credit for learning from such mistakes; even more credit for addressing the Bulldozer issues with a fundamental design that works so well. ?