AMD 6 core Processor

[vSpooKy 1]

Also, rumor has it Ivy Bridge processors are coming out sometime in or after April this year. I'd wait at least until then.

I agree also look at benchmarks to help your choice.

[CTCCoco 1]

I'm planning to buy a new computer.

My current computer is this (FROM 2005, updating to 2.5 gb ram and the graphic card):

AMD Athlon 3700+

2.5 GB ram DDR 400.

ATI Radeon 2600 hd pro 256 mb gddr3.

I can play games like Left for dead 2 (medium), Napoleon Total War(medium-low) and even sometimes ARMA 2 (but it runs too bad, and looks too ugly for be fun).

I'm planning to buy this:

AMD FX 4100 or 6100.

8 gb ram DDR3 1600.

ATI Radeon 6850 shappire 1gb ram ddr5.

Comparing to my old computer, this is God's computer, and even if I can play sometimes in ARMA2 with my ugly computer...

What do you think, I'll be able to run smoothly ARMA 3?

Do you have any recommendations?

Thanks for help :)

[vuckotadic 10]

I'm planning to buy a new computer.

My current computer is this (FROM 2005, updating to 2.5 gb ram and the graphic card):

AMD Athlon 3700+

2.5 GB ram DDR 400.

ATI Radeon 2600 hd pro 256 mb gddr3.

I can play games like Left for dead 2 (medium), Napoleon Total War(medium-low) and even sometimes ARMA 2 (but it runs too bad, and looks too ugly for be fun).

I'm planning to buy this:

AMD FX 4100 or 6100.

8 gb ram DDR3 1600.

ATI Radeon 6850 shappire 1gb ram ddr5.

Comparing to my old computer, this is God's computer, and even if I can play sometimes in ARMA2 with my ugly computer...

What do you think, I'll be able to run smoothly ARMA 3?

Do you have any recommendations?

Thanks for help :)

You better get Intel i3 than AMD FX 4100 or 6100.

Or get Phenom II 9xx its better than 6100 FX.

[carlostex 38]

CTCCoco, how about waitin' until Arma 3 is released? Around that time even if you want AMD, the Piledriver ietration should be ready and improve performance over Bulldozer.

[CTCCoco 1]

CTCCoco, how about waitin' until Arma 3 is released? Around that time even if you want AMD, the Piledriver ietration should be ready and improve performance over Bulldozer.

My computer really sucks at the moment, I can't play nothing and I have been like this for 7 years. Another year will be crazy for me.

BTW, I'm waiting for FX-6200 (new bulldozer) and radeon 7850-7870 which will be released soon.

[TheHous3 1]

Could Arma 3 run with Intel® Core™ i3 Processor? I saw at the system requirements that it needs i5.

I'm planning to buy a desktop and this is my first post.

[PuFu 4591]

Could Arma 3 run with Intel® Core™ i3 Processor? I saw at the system requirements that it needs i5.

I'm planning to buy a desktop and this is my first post.

If you are planning to buy a desktop computer today, i3 would be the choice for e-mails and word documents, and NOT for gaming. It might actually run the game, but i doubt all you want is to run the game, but to be able to play it and actually enjoy it, and the answer for the later is no.

i3 is a really BAD choice when it comes to processors for PC builds dedicated for games.

[antoineflemming 14]

i7... just staying... i5 on system requirements means that i5 is the minimum. But, then again, the processor isn't the only factor to look at when considering whether or not ArmA 3 will be playable.

[TheBIGLebowski 1]

I have a AMD phenom x6 processor and its awesome, been playing a bunch of BF3 with it and the exact card. I have a EVGA 550Ti and it runs everything ive thrown at it on high right out of the box, no problems thus far. Of course the highest settings wont be possible but it will look really really good.

---------- Post added at 23:39 ---------- Previous post was at 23:37 ----------

Could Arma 3 run with Intel® Core™ i3 Processor? I saw at the system requirements that it needs i5.

I'm planning to buy a desktop and this is my first post.

Best thing to do is buy a barebones kit from tigerdirect. I got 450 in my rig and it runs every game i want to play, and with a little more cash it will just take you that much farther.

[Spartan_Warrior 1]

AMD is the way to go. Best value for money. If you can wait till game is released you will get more value as new systems are released.

[CTCCoco 1]

i7... just staying... i5 on system requirements means that i5 is the minimum. But, then again, the processor isn't the only factor to look at when considering whether or not ArmA 3 will be playable.

i5 is recommended, not minium :/

[Tonci87 163]

Well I´ll be happy as long as my i7 will be able to work it.

[denco 16]

AMD is the way to go. Best value for money. If you can wait till game is released you will get more value as new systems are released.

I agree on AMD when it comes to graphic card's never had any problems not even with drivers. I bought 7970 no offical driver's yet only pre release and It work's great no crashes or anything.

But when It comes to the cpu I would give my money to intel and yea I know they are a little more expensive but its worth it trust me especially the i7 with its HT technology it works great in arma and other games too at least for me.

Edited February 28, 2012 by Denco

[Flash Thunder 10]

Intel core i7 or AMD FX 8150 which is octo core 8(cores).

For ARMA 3 if you want to play in firefights that consist of more than a dozen units.

[Covert_Death 11]

Way too much misinformation going on here.

1. i5 vs i7 is going to make NO difference in arma3, hyperthreading will not be used therefore your i7 turns into its equivalent i5, so if your going intel, get i5 and save your money for the GPU.

2. an AMD CPU would be fine, i have a 955 OC'd to 4.1Ghz and it blazes A2 at 40fps with an SLI gtx460 setup. if you have the money an intel would be BETTER but and AMD (not bulldozer for christ sake) will do the job just fine, especially a 6 core (which core per core is the exact same as a 4 core so all this 6 cores is slower cause it can't use all 6 is just you people talking out your a$$)

3. GPU, get an Nvidia, driver support is far superior, i would suggest a 560Ti MINIMUM for a3, perhaps a 570 or a 660Ti depending on price when they release.

my overall suggestion, wait until a3 is closer. there are a lot of changes coming fairly soon. for starters the new nvidia GPU's will be out soon and you will kick yourself when they do even if you buy a 5 series because those prices will drop the day the 6's release. Second is the AMD piledriver CPU's are supposed to be out before A3, don't hold your breathe, but there is a chance they COULD be a good CPU for the money and you may want to drop on that.

bottom line just wait, unless you absolutely HAVE to build it right now, in which case just do your homework and pick wisely, you shouldn't go wrong with this information.

[PuFu 4591]

Way too much misinformation going on here.

1. i5 vs i7 is going to make NO difference in arma3, hyperthreading will not be used therefore your i7 turns into its equivalent i5, so if your going intel, get i5 and save your money for the GPU.

2. an AMD CPU would be fine, i have a 955 OC'd to 4.1Ghz and it blazes A2 at 40fps with an SLI gtx460 setup. if you have the money an intel would be BETTER but and AMD (not bulldozer for christ sake) will do the job just fine, especially a 6 core (which core per core is the exact same as a 4 core so all this 6 cores is slower cause it can't use all 6 is just you people talking out your a$$)

3. GPU, get an Nvidia, driver support is far superior, i would suggest a 560Ti MINIMUM for a3, perhaps a 570 or a 660Ti depending on price when they release.

my overall suggestion, wait until a3 is closer. there are a lot of changes coming fairly soon. for starters the new nvidia GPU's will be out soon and you will kick yourself when they do even if you buy a 5 series because those prices will drop the day the 6's release. Second is the AMD piledriver CPU's are supposed to be out before A3, don't hold your breathe, but there is a chance they COULD be a good CPU for the money and you may want to drop on that.

bottom line just wait, unless you absolutely HAVE to build it right now, in which case just do your homework and pick wisely, you shouldn't go wrong with this information.

1. How do you know that? The virtual cores are used atm by the following engines: UE3, CE3, Frostbite3. Why wouldn't RV engine use those VCs?

2. On a long run, doubt anyone around here wants a Pc rig exclusively for A3. The point is, as it is intel CPUs are ahead of AMDs. It is THAT simple. Why would i recommend anyone to buy an older generation CPU? Because it is cheaper? Well, on the long run, i am sure it will show. Besides, i always go by the saying "I am to poor to buy cheap things for myself".

3. Again, the difference between AMD and Intel(CPUs) and AMD and Nvidia(GPUs) is huge. For the price of a 560Ti 2gb, you can get a 6950 which performs just as well in BIS games, as well as most others. Surely, the driver support is better for nvidia, but it's not like it is lacking for AMD either...

Anyhow, A3 is about 1 year away (Q4 2012 or Q1 2013). Things can change dramatically in the hardware department in 1 year's time...

[DualJoe 10]

What's wrong with bulldozer? Have any of the people complaining about the bulldozers or recommending i7 chips as a notable improvement actually tried using them?

Until A3 is released any recommendations for optimal performance is about as valid as today's weather-forecast for next week.

I've recently bought a fx8120, because I run linux as my primary OS and benchmarks on linux showed it to be a lot more bang for the buck than the Intel-offerings. When using all cores the bulldozers seem to be significantly more powerful than the i5/7 chips, and yes I actually do stuff with it that maxes out all cores. So far I've not seen the problems with cpu everybody is complaining about. Granted performance takes a rather ridiculous hit when running windows 7, but I very much doubt that Intel doesn't suffer a similar hit when running windows. To bad I still need it to play the occasional game, like ArmA2, but still I don't see what all the ruckus is about. Sofar not one of my games has been limited by the cpu in any way.

Take BF3 for example, everything ultra with a rock solid 60 fps and the cpu is even clocking down the few "active" cores. I've not seen even close to 100% usage of the cpu on windows 7 in any game I've tried, my harddisks and videocard are bottlenecks long before that becomes a problem.

If anything I'd say my fx8120 is overkill for current (console)generation games. Why would you recommend spending so much more on a cpu like the i7? Particularly in the case of games only the videocard seems to matter. I'd recommend to watch out to not get drawn in by the upgrade-junkies and look very closely at what you're getting for the money. More often than not I see people recommending to spend orders of magnitude more to get a little percentage increase in performance.

[denco 16]

3. GPU, get an Nvidia, driver support is far superior, i would suggest a 560Ti MINIMUM for a3, perhaps a 570 or a 660Ti depending on price when they release.

Superior In what way mate I never had any problems with amd drivers but yea nvidia high end cards are all always faster but so are more expensive.

-7970 is 30% faster than 580 and 680 is going to be 40% faster than 7970 my source: http://lenzfire.com/2012/02/entire-nvidia-kepler-series-specifications-price-release-date-43823/

[JuggernautOfWar 1]

Physx will be handled by the CPU not by the GPU. The chip manufactuerer won't matter.

Exactly this. If you want to get an AMD/ATI GPU then by all means do it. The game does not support GPU handled PhysX on either nVidia or AMD. GPU manufacturer does not matter at all in ArmA 3. There's still the standard differences of course, such as AMD usually being better at processing anti aliasing and post processing whereas nVidia tends to be a bit better at processing advanced lighting and shading that ArmA 3 will not support anyway.

[Wen 10]

I've recently bought a fx8120, because I run linux as my primary OS and benchmarks on linux showed it to be a lot more bang for the buck than the Intel-offerings. When using all cores the bulldozers seem to be significantly more powerful than the i5/7 chips, and yes I actually do stuff with it that maxes out all cores. So far I've not seen the problems with cpu everybody is complaining about. Granted performance takes a rather ridiculous hit when running windows 7, but I very much doubt that Intel doesn't suffer a similar hit when running windows.

......

If anything I'd say my fx8120 is overkill for current (console)generation games. Why would you recommend spending so much more on a cpu like the i7? Particularly in the case of games only the videocard seems to matter. I'd recommend to watch out to not get drawn in by the upgrade-junkies and look very closely at what you're getting for the money. More often than not I see people recommending to spend orders of magnitude more to get a little percentage increase in performance.

As you said, in applications that are well threaded and can use as many cores as there are, an 8-core FX8120 is more powerful than a 4 core i5 which does not even support hyperthreading. And, yes, in more GPU reliant games most CPUs on the market are overkills.

However, does ArmA fit in either of the two catagories? We've seen that the OFpoint series of games has always been CPU dependent. To date, not a single game can use up to six cores(maybe Empire Total War does? Can't remember), not to mention eight, thus a 4 core CPU with great single core performance will do a lot better than an 8 core CPU that is just atrociously bad in terms of single thread performance. And that is the reason why so many people out there are recommending 2600k.

Edited March 1, 2012 by Wen

[DualJoe 10]

Indeed Arma2 only seems to use 4 cores, barely, but it is not taxing any core close too 100% on my system. Which suggests even Arma2 is not bottlenecked by my cpu.

As I was saying, people keep throwing around words like atrocious when describing performance of the fx8120, which sofar I have yet to experience firsthand.

From what I've seen, I find it very hard to believe that changing only my cpu and motherboard for a 2600k setup would improve framerates in any way (because it seems my hdd and GPU are the current bottlenecks). Let alone offer noticeable increased performance. Running a dedicated server or alt-tabbing a no-pause multiplayer session doesn't produce any cpu-load worth mentioning, granted those weren't 128 player domination or warfare missions.

Maybe this could be tested by overclocking your cpu and if your framerates increases with the same percentage as you're overclocking, that would seem to point to a cpu-bottleneck. I could try this when I find some time, but in the few quick benchmarks I did with stock 3.1 and 4Ghz clockrates I did not see a 25% difference. Doesn't help that it's very difficult to do consistent benchmarks with AI on Arma2, because it will never run the same way twice.

[Tonci87 163]

What I experienced:

I had a System with a core 2 quad Q9300 and some old Nvidia card, I was able tu run the game at medium settings.

I bought myself a Sapphire Toxic HD5850 and did see some improvement but not as much as I expected.

After my MB broke down I bought many new parts and now I´m running a i7 2600k and it changed my Arma experience fundamentaly.

My settings now:

http://s14.directupload.net/images/120225/3giewksb.jpg

ATOC=7

PPAA=3;

PPAA_Level=2;

Benchmark E08 with ACE

http://s14.directupload.net/images/120225/y655ngl6.jpg

A more powerfull CPU really helps in Arma, especially if you play Missions with many scripts running!

[DualJoe 10]

Okay I'm stumped.

I've tried copying the settings from Tonci87 as close as I could and I also get 46 fps on benchmark 08, but here's the weird part. I can disable/enable AA and set post processing from very low to normal/high and I still get 46 fps. As I said I'm not getting 100% load on any of my cores, so I tried different cpucount and exthreads settings, but going from cpucount 2 to 16 and exthreads 5 and 7 doesn't seem to do anything at all and I'm still getting 46 fps in benchmark 08. I've run all those tests windowed so I could check windows performance graphs and MSI Afterburner while running the test and no matter what cpucount-/exthread-value I use I always see the same thing. 4 cores are doing something, but at most 85% for a single core.

Another strange thing is that I get the lowest CPU and GPU load on the wide open panning views but at the same time the framerate is low as well. With Tonci87 settings I get the highest framerates in the busy scenes with all the AI running/driving through the screen and panning the buildings. It almost looks like the Arma2 engine itself is artificially limiting the framerates.

Btw viewdistance seems to be related to this, because dropping the viewdistance from just over4900 to about 4500 and I get a framerate of around 55. No idea how I can get the cpucount and exthreads settings working on my system.

EDIT

I'd like to know how much cpuload the core i2600k needs to get the exact same framerate in Arma2 as my fx8120 cpu. Considering only 35/38% of the available cpu power is used in my case even ArmA2 does not justify the more than 100 euro price difference for the cpu (I got mine for just over 170 euro including shipping while the cheapest i7 in my region at that time was 290 without shipping). I think you'd get a lot more if you spend that money on a better videocard or ssd or save it for a future upgrade.

Edited March 2, 2012 by DualJoe

[Montanaro 0]

I'm interested in the 8 core AMD, but apparently it's hardly better than the 6 core plus it uses AM3+ whereas my mobo is only AM3.....

Which makes me really want to switch to Intel i7s. But dang, that will cost over $500...

I'm more interested in crossfiring two Video cards and getting a 120gb SSD and sticking with my 3.9 ghz x4.

[Tonci87 163]

The Arma Engine is a great mystery.

@Montaro, I think your setup should be fine until Arma 3 gets released, that will be the time to look for new Hardware.

Actually you don´t need a powerfull system with i7 because most of the games out there don´t benefit from it. I run Skyrim at maximum Settings+INI tweaks+A crapload of HD Mods and still get 60+ FPS (I have a FPS Limiter mod, otherwise the FPS go through the roof and the camera movement becomes jerky in some caves). Most of the games are made to work on consoles, as long as your PCis more powerfull than the consoles you should have no problems (but an i7 really helps when you are doing stuff in Vegas or AutoCAD)