(10-18-2015, 10:21 PM)sulblazer Wrote: I hope AMD will keep cost low and put some heat on Intel to lower the prices of their CPUs. Core iX prices haven't budged very much in the last 2 years.
A 40% improvement in IPC is really good...if they can deliver on it.
AMD CPU powering a gaming PC may be reality once again (I miss the Phenom II days!)
Still rocking that stock FX8350, which actually runs most games pretty well with little stuttering.
Furthermore, we may get a glimpse into the Zen performance when benchmarks are introduced in early 2016.
But how does that FX perform in Dolphin (using the latest dev. build)?
I see you have a decent AM3+ mainboard and some high-speed RAM. If you care about Dolphin performance, maybe you could try this just for fun:
Remove that FX CPU and replace it with a *dirt-cheap* Athlon II X2 280 or 270 (dual-core with 1MB L2 cache per core) and then overclock it to ~4.2 GHz (while still set to run at stock voltage!).
The Phenom II has higher IPC than any FX (Bulldozer/Piledriver), but it runs hot as ****, is hard to overclock without running into stability issues or losing the power-saving functionality and is far from being power-efficient.
But the Athlon II, when paired with high-speed (1866MHz+), low-latency RAM and overclocked to 4.1+ GHz has *the same IPC* as a Phenom II (with DDR3 RAM). Still better than any current FX CPU.
The increased memory speeds, doubled L2 cache and lower latency makes up for the loss of the L3 cache.
Even when heavily overclocked, it runs so cool and sucks so little power, it's unbelievable. And as a special bonus, you keep all the power-saving features.
I think you might get better performance in Dolphin by "downgrading" to the cheapest AMD CPU available today
It's like AMD's version of the Pentium G Anniversary Edition.