guys this is the MSI 990 fxa
gd80 and it is an am3 plus motherboard featuring full support for SLI Crossfire
X and AMD bulldozer 8 core CPUs this is
an fx 8150 installed on a Crosshair 5 formula now the Crosshair 5 formula is
the board that was used by 99% of the reviewers out there for their bulldozer
launch coverage so what I'm aiming to do here is to find out whether the
Crosshair 5 formula will perform any different from the MSI equivalent
high-end gaming skew with a single
6970 8 gigs of DDR3 memory and an 8150
FX 8 core CPU from AMD so I have done my
first set of run throughs now I can't
get the Witcher 2 running properly right now it's something to do with the game
updating and my save files won't load and so I'm going to have to examine that
but for now I want to bring you the results that I can so what I'm going to
be doing is I'm going to be running the Crosshair 5 the 990 fxa gd80 and then
for completeness sake I'm going to throw a 2500k into the
mix and uh that will be on a z68 board right
there so that's the z68 AG gd80 just to see how the 8 150 Compares against its
closest competitor price-wise on the Intel side so I've done my run through
with the 990 fxa gd80 board now can see
what it's called down there just so you guys know that I'm telling you what it
is and I've only encountered one very curious result so on the top are my
numbers with the 990 fxa and on the bottom are my numbers with the Crosshair
F so you can see these gaming numbers are very close Metro 2033 is within uh
margin of error Battlefield Bad Company 2 within margin of error crisis 2 within
margin of error and lost yeah Lost
Planet 2 is identical and finally Dirt 3
is well within margin of error but cinebench for some reason performed
dramatically better on the gd80 so before I put my Sandy bridge where is it
2500k on the bench I'm going to go and I'm going to throw the Crosshair 5 back
on there just to give it another shot at that cinebench Benchmark let's see if
maybe it was just an anomaly looks like it was purely an anomaly guys 5.84 is is
well within margin of error of 5.82 so
I'm going to go ahead and say that these boards perform pretty much identically
with the 8150 at stock speeds now I'm
going to go ahead and get on with my Sandy Bridge testing well my Sandy
Bridge numbers are complete so this is with the same test platform except for a
different CPU and different motherboard obviously and I think the overall
conclusion is that a whole lot is being made about the bulldozer performance or
lack thereof against its Sandy Bridge counterparts but looking at the test
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
that I'm running I'm running at 1080p which is the full resolution of this
monitor which most gamers are transitioning towards if they're not
already using it and then I'm also running at high details with
anti-aliasing and an isotropic filtering on in most cases and you can see here
that in most of the games most of the applications I'm running my average and
my minimum frames per second are very very playable at those settings
so yeah this is one of the things where
I'm kind of looking at it going well okay yes the 2500k does perform better
you can see there are games where it really pulls away such as crisis 2 where
we're looking at outside the margin of error in terms of the performance
difference somewhere in the 8% range Lost Planet 2 it does perform a little
bit better remember that one's a Ken bench mark so that should be fairly
representative Dirt 3 it does pull ahead this is a CPU limited game and it's
about 5% better um but it doesn't perform as well in something heavily
threaded like cinam Ben for example I mean yes it's not that far behind
considering the fact that the 2500k is a cheaper processor than the 8150 but you
also have to bear in mind that the platform is more expensive if you want to build a gaming rig like let's say
dual 6970 gaming rig with uh high-end
gaming CPU but RAM etc etc you're looking at on the low end a
970 chipset for AMD or a 990x which are
both still Crossfire capable whereas with Intel if you want a crossfire or
SLI ready board you have to use a p67 or
a z68 boards which are significantly more expensive so you do have to factor
that in so thank you for checking out my little video where we did establish that
there's really no difference in performance between one 990 FX board and
another with the bulldozer 8150 FX chip
and then that the performance Delta between the 2500k and the 8150 is while
significant yes it is significant in some cases uh may not be a deal breaker
especially if you're running at sort of real world resolutions in Real World
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