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I'm building a new PC but I'm stuck at one thing.
What CPU should I choose if what I do mostly is programming & gaming?
I saw opinions here and there saying Intel's CPUs would be good, others saying AMDs, but none seemed to give me a clear answer.
The 2 options I would have are Intel Skylake, Core i5 6400 2.70GHz & AMD Vishera, FX-8350 4.0GHz.
I'm open to any other recommendations, preferably good price/value ratio.
I'd recommend Intel, they're really reliable, have low power consumption and future-proof if you're into keeping your rig for more than 3-4 years.
AMD has a good performance/price ratio, but are more risky, heat issues and useless cores for marketing.
For gaming just rely on a good GPU, the CPU bottle neck is pretty much a myth if you have an i5 2500 or better.
You'd get better performance with a 4th gen Intel CPU and a better GPU. Keep that in mind.
I know that everybody will recommend Intel, except me. However, sometimes Intel is not the best. The price/performance of an i5 6400 vs AMD FX-8350 (I'd recommend looking into the FX-8320E as well, because it is just as well binned as the 8350, but $40 cheaper) is that the FX-8350 is winning, in my opinion
Keep in mind that this is the 4460, not the 6400 (800Mhz clock difference), and you can also OC the 8350, and match it up with the 4460 quite nicely, meanwhile having 4 threads on deck for whatever, while with the i5, CPU is probably utilized all the time (all four threads)
I would say it would mainly depend on the type of programming you intend on doing. Gaming as a whole isn't CPU intensive so I would disregard that as an issue for the CPU as that will mainly depend on the GPU.
Programming wise, if you plan to work on small self made projects again this wouldn't be an issue as you wouldn't be utilizing the full CPU. If however you were working on a large scale enterprise solution that you had to build and deploy on your local machine that is when a better CPU might come into play.
As an example, a large project ( 100+ projects) written in C# that relies on multiple instances of MSBuild to compile I would recommend an i7, simply for the fact that is has hyper-threading to allow more threads to be run in parallel. If however you were working on less large scale solutions I would go with an i5 as it has more than enough performance to handle most programming and gaming needs.
TLDR: For moderate gaming and programming there would be no noticeable difference performance wise between either CPU.
My opinion is to buy the Intel if you don't care too much about the money.
I had an FX-8150, and I can tell you that the 4 additional cores are not worth it. I did a lot of programming and gaming, and the 8 core were indeed useless, 4 would have sufficed.
In addition, the AMD 8 cores are REALLY hot. The stock fan was noisy as hell, and I frequently hit 80°C (175°F), with only 1 core at full load (~15% overall). You will need an above average fan.
Now, if you want to buy something cheaper that the Intel, I think it would be better to buy an FX-4350, and not an FX-8350.
It has the same per-core cache, and the same 8MB L3 cache than the FX-8350. All the other features are the same.
I think it will perform better than the FX-8350 in a real situation, unless you really need 8 cores. The fact that it doesn't have an integrated GPU and use an older technology make it much cheaper than the Intel.
You can also compromise with an FX-6350. With an FX-4350 or 6350, you can spend the extra money on a water-cooling, this will enable higher overclocking and certainly better performance than a 8350.
