So I was looking at reviews for CPU option upgrades for my newest gaming build motherboard and I am finding lots of people reporting issues with the Biostar A960D+ running the newer AMD FX-xxxx CPU's to where the CPUs will run ok at native clock, but that the Turbo Feature of the CPU's have to stay off to avoid a melt down of the chipset and voltage regulators. As well as overclocking with this board comes at risk of causing damage due to excessive heat of chipset and regulators.
Question is, if I stick with this motherboard and get a CPU that has this Turbo Feature and I run it without the Turbo Feature enabled, is this going to really hold back the CPU's performance potential much or is it a small percentage?
* This Turbo feature reminds me of the 25/33Mhz FSB Turbo switch on an old 386 to where there is some gain in speed, but not that much.
This motherboard I pretty much got for free since it came bundled with 8GB of Crucial Ballistix DDR3 RAM, and was priced about the cost of the RAM itself, even though it was sold as with free RAM in the bundle. So if I have to get a better motherboard I could I suppose, but if the performance gain in this Turbo feature is small, it may not justify $80 for a better motherboard.
I was originally going to spend up to $200 for the AMD FX-8350 4Ghz 8-core CPU, but I have been waiting for almost 9 months for the price tag to drop to $150 for that CPU. Reading later into those who have bought this CPU, I am now finding out that many people are claiming that even at native clock the heatsink that comes bundled with this 8-core CPU is not adequate to keep the CPU cool and so people are suggesting buying a better heatsink. In addition to this there are many complaints that the heatsink that comes bundled from AMD has an issue with the latches that seem too short and require you to bear down lots of force downward onto the board to get the latch to lock. I am not one to force a heatsink down to the point that it warps the motherboard like that, so I put my plans on buying this CPU on hold even when the price dipped to $159.99 for a day on Tiger Direct in which I was very very close to clicking BUY.
Currently I have a Athlon II x4 620 2600Mhz quadcore in it and it runs ok, but it would be nice to have an all powerful 8-core system to hold my gaming needs for the next 5+ years to which I may just need to upgrade RAM and Video Cards along the way. I have also been looking at the AMD FX-8320 3.5Ghz 8-core which is about $40 cheaper on average to the 8350 and 500Mhz slower, but with just $40 between the 8320 and the 8350, why not hold out for the 8350 instead of settling for less processing power.
I also looked at the 4 and 6 core FX CPU's, but the performance gain in some doesnt justify spending the money when the current Athlon II x4 620 2600Mhz scores around some of the FX 4xxx series chips in benchmark scores, and the FX 6xxx series are at scores in benchmark between what I already have and the 8-core .... so once again I am thinking why settle for less and holding out for the FX-8350 4Ghz which has the 4.2Ghz Turbo Feature, while the FX -8320 is 3.5Ghz with 4.0Ghz Turbo feature.
Here are both CPU's that I have been close to purchasing both when their prices have dropped for a day or two. The FX-8320 dropped to $129.99 the one day and I almost bought that when the FX-8350 was still not budging much and still $179.99.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113284 = FX-8350
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113285 = FX-8320
For the fact that the frequency difference between the 8320 is 500Mhz for Turbo and 200Mhz for the 8350 for Turbo, I am assuming that the performance gain in the 8350 for the Turbo feature is 2.5x less than the lack of Turbo for the 8320. Messing around with systems overclocking etc, 200mhz generally doesnt really show much improvement to brag about, but 500mhz usually stands out as a larger difference among a native clock and overclock. So I am thinking that the 8350 would be less prone to feeling bottlenecked with the Turbo feature disabled at 4Ghz never running at 4.2Ghz vs the 8320 running at 3.5Ghz and never running at 4Ghz.
