i3 or fx

trollcast

Please tell me its not just the intel fanboys but on another forum we're arguing over processors and someone is trying to say that for the same price you should go for an i3 over an fx-8120.

The i3 is £100 and the fx-8120 is £120, however you get a £20 rebate with it so their both the same price???

The guy has already said that he wants the pc for a bit of photo / video editing along with some light cad work and some gaming with recording.

wuliheron

It sounds like Intel fanboys to me. I recommend people use the Steam hardware forums which are well moderated and don't put up with a lot of that crap. Video editing, gaming while recording, cad work, etc. can all benefit from the extra cores of the fx-8120. The i3 has better single thread performance making it better suited for everyday computing and video gaming without the recording.

Routaran

I'll second that, for everyday use, i3 will be slightly better but as soon as you throw in CAD and the likes that can put all the cores to good use, the fx-8120 will be better.

trollcast

Would the 8120 not beat the i3 for general work if you overclocked it abit, I think about 3.7ghz is doable with the stock fan?

wuliheron

The bottom line always comes down to whether you are satisfied with the results or not. For everyday computing overclocking it probably won't make a noticeable difference. For video games it might, but I'd recommend trying it without overclocking first to see if it is good enough as it is. At any rate you don't want to overclock a new computer for the first week or so until the thermal grease has a chance to stabilize and invade all the cracks.

Routaran

I don't think you'll be able to see any real difference between the two cores for everyday use unless you run benchmarks on them. For gaming, depends, some games take advantage of multiple cores so they should perform better on the 8120.

As far as overclocking on stock cooling, I don't think you will get 15% overclock with stock cooling. Heat becomes a problem after about 5-8% in my experience and as wuliheron said, you have to give the system a burn in period to make sure the thermal paste is able to fill in all the cracks before you try any overclocking.

r4z0r84

I have a Phenom II X6 1055T processor @4.0ghz stock cooler, personally i use it for all of the above, cad (3dstudio max) photoshop cs3(photo editing), sony vagas(video editing) and the average internet use, If you can find one of these on ebay for example (ebay in AU ranges from $96-160) i would recommend it over any of the FX series cpu's its the previous series and absolutely smashes the new FX series without question.

In terms of the i3 it really depends if it is the newer sandy bridge or the older i3's.
I am no intel fanboy nor amd fanboy but the newer series may look slower then the AMD equivilent but they do beat single core performance, this means photo editing will be faster using the i3, but it will struggle compared with the AMD equivilent in terms of gaming and cad/video.

I have a i5 2500k for gaming, i use the phenom for cad/HD video editing and so forth.

in hindsight it comes down to the graphics card your using for video editing/cad/gaming. (cpu bottle necking happens when using multiple graphics cards) really depends on the extent of video editing (home/small business/theater production)