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Yo there, Im building a system to use linux, write in latex, documents, databases , programming,, virtualization and watch videos and images (2D) but Im stuck at the processor, between a fx 6300 that Im using in another machine and the ryzen series, But looking at the specs it seems that the ryzen platform was made more to gaming and fancy graphical use instead of what I intend to do, and the bottom line of ryzen seems to lack enough power to work (I have seen this does not have the virtualization support), so which has better performance, based in the uses described before, the fx6300 based on socket AM3+ or the ryzen series on AM4?

PD. The idea is to have enough punch to work without spending lots of money.

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  • I'm confused as to what the issue is here. What's the issue with your FX 6300, why is it not performing as expected? Why is Ryzen not a viable upgrade path? How much money are you working with?
    – JMY1000 ♦
    Commented Dec 18, 2017 at 21:47
  • No issues, I wish to build another pc. I don’t know if the Ryzen systems will support the stress of the work mentioned . I’m speaking of around US 250. V.gr.: I have and old celeron at 1.6 Ghz (dont remember the generation but this one is from before the i series ) that outperforms a recent A10 7300 . So I do not want to buy a newer but less capable system.
    – riccs_0x
    Commented Dec 18, 2017 at 21:59
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    You might want to look at getting a small (32 GB to 256 GB) SSD to use as a cache. It does not look like your specified applications are too demanding regarding CPU. However, I can tell you that the old 15h based CPU architectures are far less performant than the current generation Ryzen and Coffee Lake, or even as old as Sandy Bridge on the Intel side. Whether your applications would benefit from multiple threads or GPGPU acceleration I do not know.
    – timuzhti
    Commented Dec 19, 2017 at 3:57

3 Answers 3

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TL;DR: Ryzen, unless you plan on never, ever touching this computer after building it.

Let's take a quick look at the advantages/disadvantages:

Ryzen              |                 FX
–––––––––––––––––––|–––––––––––––––––––
Performance        |      Performance/$
Platform           |      Platform cost
Upgrade path       |

Performance

While I'm having some trouble understanding exactly what your workload is (terms like "virtualization" and "programming" encompass a wide range of things) and how much processing power that requires, you've indicated that your FX-6300 was adequate for these tasks.

Based on the tasks you've listed, it seems that most of the applications you're running are either multithreaded or simply don't require that much processing power. As such, we can take a look at the multi-threaded benchmarks for the FX 6300 in comparison to Ryzen to get an idea of processing power:

CPU                | Passmark         | Passmark/$
–––––––––––––––––––|––––––––––––––––––|––––––––––––––––––
FX-6300            | 6370             | 92.33
FX-8350            | 8946             | 81.33
Ryzen 3 1200       | 6784             | 61.81
Ryzen 3 1300X      | 7376             | 57.19
Ryzen 5 1400       | 8447             | 54.50

Even the lowest of the low for Ryzen should be more than enough for your workload by this metric. It is worth noting that the entry level Ryzens (1200 and 1300X) do not have SMT; if you plan on running a workload that requires more than 4 cores (e.g. a host OS and >3 VMs), you should probably consider getting a better CPU. Ryzen offers these quite easily though.

Performance/$

Because of the availability of FX series CPUs–even new still–FX still takes the cake for performance/$.

Platform

The AM3+ platform is terribly old, and lacks many features, some of which would even be considered "standard" today: SATA 3, USB-C/3.1, and (gasp) RGB. At the same time, AM3+ only supports 22-38 PCI-e 2.0 lanes (depending on chipset), whereas AM4 24-32 PCI-e 3.0 lanes (depending on chipset.) AM3+ also lacks M.2.

Platform cost

Because of the availability of (especially used) hardware, AM3+ is still a slightly cheaper platform than AM4. With that said, the difference is relatively small. The real value comes in memory: DDR3 prices are fine now, while DDR4 is stupid high (roughly double the cost) due to DRAM shortages.

Purchase new

While FX CPUs are still available new in large quantities, the availability of AM3+ motherboards has dropped heavily. If you want an AM3+ motherboard, you'll either have to pay too much or buy used.

Upgrade path

The FX platform really has no upgrade path to speak of–once you get the FX-8350, it's not really worth the money to go anything higher Meanwhile, on the Ryzen platform you can just keep going up to a Ryzen 7 1800X–over 2x the power of a Ryzen 3 1200.

Intel?

No. For multithreaded workloads, Ryzen currently has the $/performance on the medium-low end.

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    This answer is so good I want to delete mine. Great research and formatting work.
    – jcam3
    Commented Dec 19, 2017 at 15:47
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Ryzen series chips actually have the edge right now against Intel's offerings when dealing with multi-threaded workloads. Yes, they are great for gaming, but they're great for production as well.

Providing that budget and availability is not an issue, I firmly recommend the newer Ryzen series over the older FX series. Ryzen has significantly more speed and processing power compared to their equivalent product tiers in the FX series, and you'll be future proofing your machine to last longer before another upgrade / replacement cycle.

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Ryzen has the clear advantage. How good a CPU is isn't only affected by the number of cores. There is much more to CPUs than that. Ryzen does way better in both multi-threaded and single-threaded workloads than any FX chip because of that. Core count is what companies use for marketing as the average user thinks that more cores is always better, which is obviously not the case. Also, as mentioned by previous answers, your rig will be upgradable with Ryzen as AMD will continue to support the AM4 socket for a couple of years.

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