I want to buy a new PC mostly for 3d design in Blender. I have found a few PCs now on Amazon that fit my more or less tight budget but seem to offer crazy performance.
A few of them had an AMD FX 8300 processor which runs on 8-cores with 4.2GHz each. I am wondering if the numbers just look big or if it is any good. I have read elsewhere that it isn’t that good for gaming but what about Blender? Should I rather take an intel CPU in the same price range? Also how does it do with e.g. a GTX 1050TI? Any bottlenecks?
It’s fine, that “not good for games” statement is because most games aren’t multithreaded so they can’t use all cores effectively. The FX-8300 has slightly poorer performance per each core compared to it’s Intel equivalents so games that run mostly on 1 thread are going to run slightly worse.
For Blender the more threads you can run the better (for rendering). If you want 8 threads from an Intel chip you’ll need a quadcore i7, making the FX8300 a bargain by comparison. Assuming you can find one for a good price of course. So while a gamer might recommend something like a used i5 2500K you’ll be better off with the FX8300 IMHO.
1050TI is a good choice too as it’s pretty much the only good affordable card on the market right now with the inflated prices.
Just to note:
If you can afford GTX 1060 definitely take it over GTX 1050 Ti. It’s way superior compute power can make it much better price to performance in most cases. Even the 3 GB version is way better than GTX 1050 Ti unless you plan on GPU rendering complex scenes that can fill up over 3 GB of video buffer (that’s quite complex scenes, never ever done one like that myself).
Also, due to architecture differences, 4 GHz Ryzen chip will be faster than 4.2 GHz FX chip. If you can afford Ryzen 5 2600, it’s definitely a much better option. Again, depends on your budget. Note that this would be 50% more threads, better IPC, newer architecture. You’d get many benefits, but it can end up being more expensive.
This is an outdated processor architecture and the numbers indeed just look big, make sure you’re not getting ripped off.
It’s not really eight cores as far as virtually all Blender-related math is concerned, because two cores share one floating point unit, making it effectively a quadcore.
One such processor core at 4+Ghz is significantly slower than a similarly-aged Intel CPU core at 4Ghz, which is why it’s considered bad for gaming.
Also keep in mind that this is using DDR3 memory, whereas DDR4 has been the standard for a while.
I don’t know about your budget, but AMD Ryzen CPUs are up to date and offer good multicore performance for their price.
I as a user of a slightly older AMD FX 6300 6 core 3.5mhz that I used to build my system awhile back say " YES"! it would be just fine and dandy! I run Blender as well as sometimes Rhino 6 , Substance Painter and at times a quick prog like Inkscape just to get what I want done… as not one program like Blender will do ALL! I have had zero problems beyond the occasional phantom crash from using included Principled BSDF shader node ( sometimes when using the slider and hold to the edge of drag, Blender just vanishes completely ) ? Restore will get me back to just befor loading the shader node so nothing is lost and it is usually fine there after, and it is a rare occurrence, and can happen when-ever. Like Peso said" some programs are not multi-core compatible… but if I remember right you can specify them to run on a single core and they don’t suffer., and since they depend more on the GPU them the CPU the point is mostly mute anyway… a AMD 8 core combined with say an Nvidia Geforce 1070 Ti graphics card running 2432 Cuda Cores will run any game or render very well ! Concentrate on the Graphics card and pick the best you can afford, and you can’t lose!
Others may and WILL argue… but this combination is very inexpensive and you can then spen your money on periperals and software which are really expensive! IMHO
What is your budget? Do you plan to buy CPU and GPU?
What do you have plans to do with Blender? Are you more interested in modeling than rendering with Cycles?
Virtually any CPU of the past ten years will run Blender “fine and dandy”. It really comes down to price, these CPUs are quite cheap, but they’re also quite slow (and hot!) relative to more modern CPUs.
That’s bad advice, a modern CPU has easily double the single-threaded performance of this CPU and many games take a proportional hit because of driver overhead. Pairing a 1070Ti with a FX 8300 will not let you get the most out of the GPU.
For that budget you should easily be able to build a system with at least a Ryzen 2600 and a GTX 1060.
I’d probably wait a little though, the new NVIDIA GPUs are coming out soon, likely pushing down older GPU prices and RAM/SSD prices are dropping as well.
Keep in mind what BeerBaron said about waiting for new nvidia cards.
About GTX 1060, if you decide to buy it you make sure it is the 6GB vRAM version, because 3GB vRAM version is little amount not only for cycles, but also for Eevee in 2.8.
I would recommend at least 16GB for system RAM.
About CPU, many threads are good for rendering, but many tasks in Blender take advantage of single thread performance. So you choose the most thread you can buy, but you do not choose something very bad in single thread performance: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html
Here Is a link to a comparison (mostly for personal curiosity) when I bought a fx 8350
There are bigger and better processors out there. But this one fit in my budget (small!).
The FX processors are use the “bulldozer” architecture.
Even a Ryzen 3 machine should get you better performance for a price that is still tiny (due to superior floating point processing). The FX series was started with Bulldozer, which completely decimated AMD’s marketshare amid poor performance and hugely misleading marketing material.
avoid a amd fx cpu at any cost,as ace dragon said even ryzen 3 its far more efficient and powerfull cpu,
fx cpu its the biggest disaster in amd history,
go for ryzen or intel coffe lake
For the initial workstation, very basic, a good option. For games a very good choice, because its give big performance for that price. Big problem FX cpu it’s a not enough performance per core. In blender many tools work in one thread. Need to know one moment, how you overclocked cpu, for overclocking FX the bus gives more performance than the overclocking of the multiplier. Fx is actual because the game and programs become more multithreaded and FX have 8 cores, but only for initial workstation. Some tests in games
Because in blender most of the time used one threaded tools, cpu with more perfomance per core will be better, but when you need more threads, FX will be better if you compare with the processor for the same price
Short, avoid the FX platform. at this point in time it is an old architecture, that simply does not perform, even when i came out it had problems performing. I had one, and still someone on the shelf, for the collection, but not something I would use anytime soon.
looking at new ryzen 6 core 12 thread, it easly outperforms the 8 core FX… even older gen intel CPU’s like the 5820k easly outperforms the FX. so avoid.
There’s a bit more nuance to it, but everything said and done you are correct. There are 8 FPU’s but in case of 256 bit operations the 128 bit FPUs need to combine into a 256 bit one.
It’s not all about the Hz. You can have high clock speed high latency DDR4 that is out performed by lower clock speed DDR3 simply because the particular DDR3 module has way better latency.
Yes, for optimal help always tell us your budget, @anon41657363
BTW, what price are those FX systems you were looking at? I wouldn’t pay more than €60 for a mobo + FX 8300 combo if I was buying today and I’d take a very close look at the MoBo’s VRM before I handed over the money.
PS. I’m Using a FX 8300 based system right now and I have had all the parts needed for a Ryzen 5 1600 build for over half a year now. Only bought the parts to support AMD for having delivered what they promised. But the FX 8300 for my use has still been fine. So far…
There is nothing wrong with what you want. I suggest you do a comprehensive approach: CPU, Memory, BIOS, harddrive(ATA/SSD), Operating System, Drivers and etc…Some processor does well running full developed applications in Windows. Blender is semi development work and depending on your network it may not have the support (ie…OS updates) to teach your machine/AI to mature. Personally, I usually change what I prefer every two to five years (now I like Linux and AMD CPU). I also suggest you have friends which are part of a “Swap group.” Small parts changes can improve performance. Don’t give your expensive computer parts unless it is of equivalent value (memory, CPU, HardDrive…).
Though FX brought some intresting ideas, it never delivered what was expected. And again if you get it now, you are investing in a platform without any future/upgrade path.
Looking at a review of an AMD APU 2400G, it easly outperforms the FX-8370. Both in Cinebench and Corona rendering engines. And this will translate directly into blender as well. So if you want to save money, get the APU and eventually upgrade to the high end Ryzen 3000 when it comes out as AM4 platform is future compatible.
You also get new tech that was lacking in AM3, like fast storage (NVME), USB 3.1, UBS C, etc etc. And a significantly lower power consumption between the two.
More blender test. the bottom Kaveri is the latest revision of the FX line, though with 1/2 the cores/moduels. the A10-7870K, even with doulbe the core it is still falling behind the 2400g
Thanks to everyone for the great responses. I rechecked my budget and it comes out at 850€ top. I tried building a PC on a website with a 6GB GTX 1060 and a Ryzeon 2600 like BeerBaron suggested but there is no way that stays below my budget.