cosmoruski Wrote:So the FX 6300 is not a ripoff - it's actually the better CPU for the money!
It depends on what you're doing and what the strengths of any given microarchitecture are. For Dolphin, Intel clearly has the advantage in both price and performance. For the cost of the FX 6300 (~$109 USD), you can get an i3-4310 for only $10 more, and it would would circles around the FX 6300. The FX 6300 would have to do some heavy overclocking just to match it. Even the Pentium G3430 (~$100) will give the FX 6300 a run for it's money in Dolphin in most normal circumstances.
If you're doing highly multi-threaded work (video or image processing, encryption, compression, extracting large files, etc) things may be more even price-wise (I don't frequent Tom's Hardware enough to know the benchmarks concerning this off-hand). Modern PC games often heavily rely on the GPU for the bulk of their processing, so PC gaming is another area where some consider AMD over Intel.