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guys this is the MSI 990 fxa

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gd80 and it is an am3 plus motherboard featuring full support for SLI Crossfire

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X and AMD bulldozer 8 core CPUs this is

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an fx 8150 installed on a Crosshair 5 formula now the Crosshair 5 formula is

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the board that was used by 99% of the reviewers out there for their bulldozer

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launch coverage so what I'm aiming to do here is to find out whether the

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Crosshair 5 formula will perform any different from the MSI equivalent

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high-end gaming skew with a single

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6970 8 gigs of DDR3 memory and an 8150

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FX 8 core CPU from AMD so I have done my

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first set of run throughs now I can't

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get the Witcher 2 running properly right now it's something to do with the game

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updating and my save files won't load and so I'm going to have to examine that

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but for now I want to bring you the results that I can so what I'm going to

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be doing is I'm going to be running the Crosshair 5 the 990 fxa gd80 and then

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for completeness sake I'm going to throw a 2500k into the

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mix and uh that will be on a z68 board right

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there so that's the z68 AG gd80 just to see how the 8 150 Compares against its

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closest competitor price-wise on the Intel side so I've done my run through

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with the 990 fxa gd80 board now can see

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what it's called down there just so you guys know that I'm telling you what it

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is and I've only encountered one very curious result so on the top are my

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numbers with the 990 fxa and on the bottom are my numbers with the Crosshair

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F so you can see these gaming numbers are very close Metro 2033 is within uh

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margin of error Battlefield Bad Company 2 within margin of error crisis 2 within

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margin of error and lost yeah Lost

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Planet 2 is identical and finally Dirt 3

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is well within margin of error but cinebench for some reason performed

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dramatically better on the gd80 so before I put my Sandy bridge where is it

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2500k on the bench I'm going to go and I'm going to throw the Crosshair 5 back

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on there just to give it another shot at that cinebench Benchmark let's see if

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maybe it was just an anomaly looks like it was purely an anomaly guys 5.84 is is

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well within margin of error of 5.82 so

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I'm going to go ahead and say that these boards perform pretty much identically

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with the 8150 at stock speeds now I'm

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going to go ahead and get on with my Sandy Bridge testing well my Sandy

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Bridge numbers are complete so this is with the same test platform except for a

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different CPU and different motherboard obviously and I think the overall

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conclusion is that a whole lot is being made about the bulldozer performance or

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lack thereof against its Sandy Bridge counterparts but looking at the test

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settings that are being used in a lot of places I don't really feel they're all that realistic so for all of the games

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that I'm running I'm running at 1080p which is the full resolution of this

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monitor which most gamers are transitioning towards if they're not

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already using it and then I'm also running at high details with

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anti-aliasing and an isotropic filtering on in most cases and you can see here

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that in most of the games most of the applications I'm running my average and

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my minimum frames per second are very very playable at those settings

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so yeah this is one of the things where

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I'm kind of looking at it going well okay yes the 2500k does perform better

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you can see there are games where it really pulls away such as crisis 2 where

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we're looking at outside the margin of error in terms of the performance

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difference somewhere in the 8% range Lost Planet 2 it does perform a little

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bit better remember that one's a Ken bench mark so that should be fairly

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representative Dirt 3 it does pull ahead this is a CPU limited game and it's

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about 5% better um but it doesn't perform as well in something heavily

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threaded like cinam Ben for example I mean yes it's not that far behind

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considering the fact that the 2500k is a cheaper processor than the 8150 but you

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also have to bear in mind that the platform is more expensive if you want to build a gaming rig like let's say

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dual 6970 gaming rig with uh high-end

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gaming CPU but RAM etc etc you're looking at on the low end a

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970 chipset for AMD or a 990x which are

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both still Crossfire capable whereas with Intel if you want a crossfire or

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SLI ready board you have to use a p67 or

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a z68 boards which are significantly more expensive so you do have to factor

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that in so thank you for checking out my little video where we did establish that

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there's really no difference in performance between one 990 FX board and

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another with the bulldozer 8150 FX chip

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and then that the performance Delta between the 2500k and the 8150 is while

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significant yes it is significant in some cases uh may not be a deal breaker

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especially if you're running at sort of real world resolutions in Real World

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