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I'm about to buy a PC for my brother, and i have these two choices, please help me choose the one with better performance and money.

  1. AMD Athlon X4 945 3GHz with an ASUS M4A88TD-M
  2. Intel i5 650 3.2 GHz with a MSI H55-E33

note: it's for graphic design, multimedia and some gaming. Thanks!

asked Jul 26 '10 at 02:44

cheduardo2k's gravatar image

cheduardo2k
1.2k21028

edited Jul 26 '10 at 03:11


the AMD CPU is actually faster

the i5 650 is a dual core with hyperthreading.

For gaming it is faster than the x4 945 as even though it only has 2 cores, there faster than the cores in a x4 945. With benchmarks the i5 650 performs very close to the x4 945

If you don't use heavily threaded apps then go with the i5, and if you do (eg 3d modeling apps some games that are heavily threaded), and general apps such as web browsers and many other general usage apps.

So overall the AMD is faster but only if you can use all cores to their fullest. The core i5 has 2 cores but they are much faster and will be great if you have apps that are not heavily threaded.

overall based on what you do, go for the core i5 the only benefit you will get with the AMD CPU will be with graphic design, (mainly 3d modeling and photoshop) while the i5 will do those things slightly slower, it will do everything else faster

here are some benchmarks: http://www.guru3d.com/article/core-i5-650-660-661-review-test/12

Also wanted to add, if you are doing graphic design for school or work and time is important for you when doing it then go with the AMD CPU, multithreaded tasks will run faster and many of the modern games will also run faster (the ones that fail to use multi core CPU's properly eg second life, will run slower. with only 2 cores the i5 650 runs at roughly 80% of the speed of the x4 945

answered Jul 26 '10 at 04:37

Razor512's gravatar image

Razor512
15.6k3480242

edited Jul 26 '10 at 04:50

oh sorry, i didnt see that it was one of the dual cores, yes the i5 would have less cores in that case the amd would be physically faster

(Jul 26 '10 at 04:42) Tim Fontana Tim%20Fontana's gravatar image

Intel. the i5 has hyper-threading, so 4 real cores, + another 4 virtual. Might make all the difference. Also Intel processors are said to get more calculations per cycle

answered Jul 26 '10 at 02:47

Tim%20Fontana's gravatar image

Tim Fontana
15.3k135199368

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Asked: Jul 26 '10 at 02:44

Seen: 1,356 times

Last updated: Jul 26 '10 at 04:50