PC upgrade conundrum! (CPU)

Update:

I went ahead I got an FX8350 which saved me upgrading the motherboard also as I have decided to wait out until DDR4 becomes mainstream and see how Mantle/DX12 develops. There were plenty of hitches as per usual:

1. Made a mess of the thermal application on the IHS and off the IHS.
2. Despite carefully trying to ease the heat sink off the CPU, still managed to suddenly rip the CPU out of the socket with the heat sink (Thankfully no bent pins so need to break out a card)
3. Fitted the 8350 after updating the BIOS (oddly my 1090T still booted with the BIOS only intended for the 8350) however, no POST after a few reboots but, thankfully, it booted after a reseating of the CPU.

Also, moved my RAM over to a slot further away from the heat sink as my D14 managed push off the heat sink assembly on the closest RAM stick (That was fun to put back on)

Overall however, All up and running at 4.7GHz (could push it higher but content at the moment)

Original:


PC upgrade time! I am looking into upgrading my PC and trying to maximize the best bang for buck but, unfortunately it is not as straight forward as you would think.

My current system specs:

CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1090T
Motherboard: ASUS Crosshair IV Formula 890FX

RAM: Corsair Vengeance DDR3 2x4GB

GPU: XFX Radeon HD 7970

PSU: Corsair 750AX

SSD: OCZ Vertex 3 120GB

Case: Antec 1200 v1

First up is the CPU which has served me well, over-clocked aggressively and still going on 4-5 years so no complaints there but, I feel now is the time for an upgrade in that department and my upgrade paths are not simple. 

AMD to start off for the CPU and it would be an FX-8350 which is a not a bad chip and I could just drop it into 890FX motherboard (unofficially supported and less power features/lower HT rate though) but, it is now a 2012 chip, of AMD's previous architecture and the single-threaded performance is shockingly low (AMD have tried to correct this based on their own findings/community suggestions but something still seems to be holding it back in the latest Steamroller architecture)

A slight variation of the FX-8350 would be one of the FX-9000 chips which are still based on the older Pile driver architecture and have a whopping 220W TDP (In the past, I would of been all for it though, I have become increasingly more invested in reducing my power consumption and in general, green computing)

The last AMD option would be a 7850K APU which would also mean getting an AM2+ motherboard. The APU itself has the latest Steamroller architecture which improved single-threaded performance, way lower TDP and has some nice innovations from AMD supporting it (Heterogeneous Computing, Mantle) but, these are still things which might take the computing industry time to adopt if at all, AMD has signed on at least 40 developers for Mantle so the prospect is looking good and their Heterogeneous Computing initiative has some well known semi-conductor corporations supporting it.

Unfortunately, multi-core performance in an APU is lower thanks to the loss of 4 CPU cores on the die to accommodate the 4 GPU cores and the fabrication process used was a new one designed for APUs which lowered the clock rate compared to the previous gen APU. There is no traditional consumer CPU in the AMD roadmap at the moment for the Steamroller architecture despite AMD stating that they are not retiring the FX line.

There are rumours that AMD might be moving on to a new x86 architecture which will have a full SMT implementation like Intel rather than a partial CMT/SMT one but, at the moment, just a rumour.

Now as for the Intel CPU route, I have pinned down to 3 options: a Haswell Refresh/Devil's Canyon or wait for Broadwell.

The Haswell Refresh is essentially the same as normal Haswell but, with slightly higher clock rates and Devil's Canyon is an over-clocker focused refresh with improved heat spreader package and cherry-picked CPUs.

As I do tend to over-clock, the choice will be between a 4670k and 4770k Devil's Canyon though Intel does charge a premium for being able to over-clock via their K variant chips and Z chip-set motherboards. Performance wise, the 4670k should more than adequate for every game as only a small few take advantage of hyper-threading offered on the 4770k.

Finally, the wait for Broadwell which will not be out until sometime in Q1 2015 and the move to 14nm is an improvement but also has diminishing returns so not as much of an improvement as say 32nm to 22nm.