Can I boost my processor speed using these components? It is an FX8350.
Can I boost my processor speed using these components? It is an FX8350.
To be fair, back in 2015 when i3s and i5s were competing for similar prices, it should have been possible to get an FX-8350 for less than the cost of an i5-6400 and closer to the price of an i3-6320. Those locked i3s and i5s might have seemed better for gaming at the time, but those processors were expensive enough that they never caught up in performance. The FX-8350 had a much higher clock speed across all its cores, so it stayed way ahead of most other parts until later years. Since then, core counts have gone up, and many modern games need more threads than older mid-range Intel chips can give you. In heavy gaming like Warzone, that i5 might still get over 20% faster frame rates if paired with a good graphics card, but the i3 would be slow because it only has two cores and SMT (which is just a fancy way of saying multiple processors sharing one core). That makes the i3 worse for performance and stability in games like Warzone. There are plenty of modern games where an i5-6400 will still beat out the FX-8350, but as more people play, they probably want the extra thread count from the FX processor even if both aren't perfect anymore. With a GTX 970, many games get stuck on graphics performance rather than CPU speed, so you won't really see big differences between processors in those cases. It's worth asking yourself: have you tested your current hardware in Warzone or other popular games to see if it works well enough? And maybe lower some graphics settings a bit to reduce the strain on the graphics card and get more performance. This isn't great for gaming right now, but it should still run most games okay if you're willing to turn down some settings and accept that frame rates might sometimes drop below 60fps.