RIGHT NOW is you say, those benchmarks show the AMD chips doing fine, even against i7s... I don't follow your logic. The i3 is good but it can't be overclocked and you're giving up threads that help in non-gaming situations. i7s don't lose IPC that the i5s have as far as I know. So those benchmarks showing how it's performing against i7s are completely relevant to the discussion.
If Intel had decided to keep pushing forward with performance without regard to power consumption or heat, then it would be a different story.
As it stands, the FX chips aren't as bad as people make them out to be, they are power hungry and hot, but they don't run like shit.
When I upgraded my GPU, I bought my wife an Athlon 860K to pair with my old GPU (ROG MATRIX 7970) She's playing Skyrim with mods, Dragon Age Inquisition, and even old games like the Mass Effect Trilogy without any issues at all, and that's using a $75 AMD quad core. If she were going for 120+ FPS, then yes, she'd definitely need an i5 or i7, but for 1080/60... not really... AMD makes good low and midrange CPUs, just not high end or enthusiast, and their midrange CPUs swap blows with Intel's enthusiast chips on heavily threaded games.
My CPU has an i5 and I love it, but that doesn't mean that a 10% worse performing chip is utter shit, especially when said chip is more than 10% cheaper. It just means it's not as good.
Those benchmarks don't show 1 thread reliant cpu heavy games.
Idk what you're talking about with the i7
yes the i5 has similar IPC to the i7, that's what makes it so much more interesting for gaming purposes than the i7 right now (which actually might change once dx12 is here, btw, but I would never recommend anyone making a purchase decision based on what ifs, especially not with gaming hardware)
i7s are more expensive and not much faster than i5s in games, noone is telling you to buy an i7, you are ignoring the i5 and i3 ^^
and since you have one of those trashy amd apus, go ahead and install natural selection 2, dirty bomb, arma 3, world of tanks, ac unity (though I hear they finally patched that game? it ran like shittttttttt on fx8350s at launch and in the months after) and let me know how your performance is.
The games you mentioned are a frostbite game (one of the few engines that currently scale really well with more cores, it's an exception not the rule), ancient last gen console games that don't stress the cpu -I can get 100 fps on them too with my 2009 budget cpu- and skyrim which again isn't very cpu demanding.
Try some actual cpu reliant games like the ones I listed and come back to me. It will not be pretty
Again, i'm using a phenom II which has almost exactly the same ipc as the amd fx cpus, I live this low ipc hell every day, I speak from experience.
It's a valid discussion. AMD chips are not as good as Intel. They aren't competitive on the high end. But for a mid range CPU, they're ok. Being mediocre isn't the same as being utter shit is all I'm saying. If they were selling them for the same price as an i5, then yes, totally shit for the price, but they aren't.
I agree though, that this is all getting a bit off topic.
Valid point on the motherboard, but I'd spend for a PSU anyway. Cheap PSUs are dangerous.
They're not ok man, not for gaming
an i3 and even a pentium are ok (BECAUSE they have similar IPC to a 350 dollar i7 and even an 800 dollar 8 core intel cpu)
the amd cpus will all give you terrible minimum framerates (which results in stutter), which is a much more meaningful metric than average fps for gaming.
You're paying 280 euros for an amd fx+mobo and the experience you'll be getting in cpu dependant games will be SHIT.
That is why you cannot recommend an amd fx to anyone for gaming, because the experience will be shit.
Buy an i3 if you're on a budget, it's cheaper, it does fine in all games and your experience will never be shit.
You're just giving people terrible advice, advice that will cause buyer's remorse in people you mislead. And for what? for the sake of 'fairness'?
This isn't a case of one being faster than the other but both being good for games (e.g one does 90 fps the other 150 fps or w/e) , it's a case of one being below the minimum requirements for a good experience in pc gaming.
AMD cpus are below the minimum requirements for a good gaming experience, full stop.
The zen cpus are an opportunity to have an amd alternative that is above these minimum requirements, and that is what we are all rooting for in this thread.