get the intel, tf2 doesn't even use anything past 2 or 3 cores and intels cores are faster than amds

TF2 isn't multithreaded well. I'm not even sure it handles dual cores properly. What matters is the single core performance. This is also true for other games, more cores does not equal more performance, because it's hard to split game instructions compared to video encoding for example.

I suggest you look up benchmarks of games instead of what you linked. You'll see that the intel CPU is superior.

No not even, wait for ryzen. Probably will be much cheaper and affordable for nearly the same performance of a skylake i5.

If the price is not a problem, go for the Intel.
Or you can wait for the upcoming Ryzen CPU from AMD.

1. TF2 scales to around three cores iirc. It'll use more but you won't see almost any benefit.
   
2. Because of this, what you need is raw single threaded performance, which for the last half a decade AMD has been absolute garbage at. So normally I would say Intel without a doubt.
   
3. HOWEVER AMD's Ryzen CPUs are launching within a month, and mark the first major architecture rework from AMD in a long time, led by the same guy responsible for their Athlon 64 dominance and Apple's recent CPUs. Early previews and benchmarks are showing single threaded performance on par with Intel's latest offerings. So, wait a month.

Don't get the FX-8350. It's based on a 6 year old architecture, and as yttrium said Ryzen is coming soon, get that instead

ryzen is gonna be on par with skylake and possibly low-end kaby lake cpus, plus it's amd's first architecture to support ddr4 and pci-e 3.0 (fucking finally)

so yeah just wait, and if ryzen offerings aren't for you then there's a lot of good low-mid tier kaby lake cpus that can get the job done

Not to mention the other tech involved with those. M.2, USB 3.0, NVMe...

That's right, AMD literally didn't have USB 3.0. Motherboard manufacturers had to use add-on controllers in order to have them. What the fuck even.

PLEASE, GET INTEL.
I know 8 core is tempting. I fell for it. Biggest regret I ever made. Ever.
The clock speed and more cores doesn't justify the AMD to be a better CPU. It will at the end of the day run way hotter, and suck up more energy. My old AMD Cpu died recently, which is why I STRONGLY recommend against AMD for CPUs.

Games and general desktop tasks won't benefit from +4 cores for couple of years to come, at least until DX12 and Vulkan native game engines come out there's no real reason for avg. customer to buy more than 4 cores.

dx12 and vulkan are game api's, not engines

Thanks captain obvious, meant game engines made with native support for DX12 and Vulkan, not these current engines that are just patched to support them with results varying from slight gains to actually hurting the performance.

Even if you want intel, wait for zen, prices will drop in half for intel aswell

yeah they won't, intel will cut the prices minimally if at all and just blow amd out of the water next gen if ryzen turns out to be competitive.

Intel didn't cut prices when K8 was STOMPING Netburst. I doubt they will do it now.

A full Zeppelin die was already shown going toe to toe with Intel's 6900k (currently listed @ $1,049.99 on Newegg). Kaby Lake wont be able to touch it considering IPC/clocks are roughly the same and Zeppelin has double the core count.

That's not how it works.

calm down buddy, we are talking about multimillion dollar companies, you don't need to pick a side and fight for it

Yeah, by AMD. It'll likely be competitive but that also depends on pricing. Just wait.

not fighting for any side but do you seriously think intel r&d has been sitting on their asses for 5 years just tinkering their power efficiency with nothing left in reserve?

i doubt intel would enter pricewar with amd anytime soon considering they have +80% marketshare in desktop systems, also we have no idea how aggressively amd will price the ryzen

why are AMD fanboys so mad? my current CPU right now is an AMD, and I have to say that I'm not very happy with its level of performance. I'm going Intel very soon.

Just an image to show how tf2 favors single core rather than multicore.
It uses the other 3 cores I assigned to it too but barely.
My CPU is an FX-8350.
http://imgur.com/IOHwo5u

#1
You should buy neither of those.
The FX-8350 is four and a half years old by now. There has never been a reason to buy a four and a half years old CPU new. Used for at most 1/4 of the launch price maybe, but not new for 3/4 of it.
The fact that AMD will release a far superior replacement soon doesn't even factor into that.

Now the i5-6600K is only one and a half year old but it's direct successor and replacement, the i5-7600K has been released this month. Except for the iGPU it's virtually identical except about 8% faster. With the MSRP being only 1$ higher (so virtually identical again) the i5-6600K has also become obsolete (unless you can get it at a significant discount).

If you want to overclock and only/mostly care about TF2 you could actually get an i3-7350K and still get the same performance.
So the questions are
-are you going to overclock?
-budget?

#2
Technically correct, but "the intel" isn't the right choice, rather a different Intel CPU, depening on his specific situation. The 6600K would indeed be better if those two were the only options though.

#3
See #2.

#4
Not necessarily.
If the performance is very similar it won't be much cheaper.
RyZen availability might be spotty for a while (-> higher prices) if the OEMs hog most of the supply.
Also AMD will release CPUs based on an 8C die first, which they'd much rather sell as 6C or full 8C. They are only offering 4C CPUs based on that because at first yields might not be too great and to get some marketshare in preparation for native 4C CPUs/APUs in Q3/4 this year. So they might not be too keen on selling these for <200$, considering Intel wants 400/600$ for a 6C and 1000$ for an 8C. In fact if they don't offer any SKUs without SMTs even the 4C parts would compete i7s, so pricing them below i7s would be enough to gain marketshare, pricing them below i5s would be unreasonable.

#6
Correct, except for 3.
Availability see #4.
Early previews show it on par with Broadwell in best case scenarios, which are not Intel's latest offerings except for the HEDT, which isn't exactly relevant for TF2. The 8C die is not supposed to scale to crazy frequencies and it probably won't. It'll not win in IPC either. So for <=4C Skylake and especially Kaby Lake are expected to still win single threaded easily. We don't know how well Zen will overclock, but I highly doubt we'll see the ~5.5GHz needed to beat an overclocked Kaby Lake CPU. >4C and/or price to performance will be very interesting but that's not the point.

#7
One could argue semantics, whether Piledriver is a new architecture or not, but yes, it's ancient.
Availability see #4.

#8
Let's slow the hype train down a tiny bit.
AMD has shown Zen to get around Broadwell IPC. You can take a bet they took the best case, not an average or even worst case. As far was we know clockrates are also around Haswell/Broadwell whereas they'd need to be higher than Skylake's to actually beat it. I'm not saying it's impossible with the higher power budget per core for 4C vs 8C Zen, but I wouldn't count on it and as you've said there's still Kaby Lake. Also see #4, there might not be anything cheaper than a Kaby Lake i5 for a while from AMD.

#10
There are so many things wrong with all these arguments, I won't even go into it.
You bought a CPU which is essentially an overclocked FX-8350 with too high voltage. They are expected to draw a lot of power, run hot and die within a few years, just like every other CPU running a balls to the wall overclock.

#11
I don't know why anyone -fragged this, with some exceptions like Overwatch, ARMA 3 or Ashes of the Singularity to name a few that is correct.

#14
And why would Intel drop prices that much?
AMD isn't going to get you the same performance for half the price either. You'd still buy it a 3/4, maybe even more, so why sell it cheaper than that?

#19

Ah yes, finally someone gets it. Obviously Intel got a whole different architecture that cost them only a few billion dollars lying around, that is way faster in every regard, more efficient and also cheaper to manufacture. Because just releasing that architecture and locking the clockrates to maximize profits would be too easy. You've got to spend another couple of billions to develop another, worse architecture that you can safely release. That's how you keep shareholders happy. Because improving performance in modern microarchitectures is easy and engineers grow on trees
Now some skeptics might ask "But if Intel could develop a better architecture than Skylake so easily, why couldn't AMD do it in the 5+ years they've worked on Zen?". Well the answer is simple: AMD is obviously run by retarded monkeys who couldn't develop a good CPU if their life depended on it. Especially that Jim Keller guy.

#20
I will sit here and shake my head about people who still go by brands instead of just comparing the 3 or 4 CPUs they can actually afford or get them the performance they want and then chose the best one for them regardless of the name/brand/colour of the box/their shoe size/star sign.

Not saying they would be sitting on a completely different architecture but why would you "waste" new technologies when you're crushing the competition with just dieshrink and optimization updates.

So they are going to put R&D money into that and then not use it and hope it doesn't become outdated? Also they are going to just yell "technology" and suddenly the 2-4 years it takes to implement vanish and they can release new CPUs?

Thanks to the new nodes being delayed Intel's roadmap is stretched out even further. So the next opportunity would be Icelake (Cannonlake is rather irrelevant, mobile only), which is still 1.5 years away, but has been in the works since 2013/2014. So either Intel planned to use all those "new technologies" for years or you won't see them until at least 2021.

Considering the IPC improvement from Broadwell to Skylake was only ~3%, this isn't as big of a deal as it may seem.

After this long on this forum, haven't you realized yet that people +/- frag based on their feelings and not actual accuracy?

And Skylake to Kabylake is just tuned for slightly higher clocks with slightly NEGATIVE ipc (less than 1% but it is there and shows up in every review). Intel's architecture was basically tapped out @ Haswell.

#25
It's well hidden, SKL gets a higher IPC gain in SMT, which is exactly the situation AMD used to compare BDW and Zen.
That and the still unanswered question: How effective is AMD's SMT? It might very well be more effective, since Zen is wider than even SKL, so single threaded IPC could end up below HSW.

Yes, I have realised, sometimes I just like to remind everyone of that.

#26
Yeah no.
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2016/12/09/intel_kaby_lake_core_i77700k_ipc_review/1