AMD finally has a high-end a truly
high-end platform this so this is the 990fx Crosshair 5 formula with an 1100t
8 gigs of RAM a 120 gig SSD it's my
usual test platform except it has two
GTX 590s on it so this is pretty much
the the fastest gaming machine you can
build on an AMD
CPU well 6990 would be pretty much equivalent so so it'd be an equivalent
fastest gaming machine so what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be looking
at once and for all which is better for
gaming AMD or Intel CPUs at least from
this generation which won't be relevant uh very soon with bulldozzer coming out
and Intel having a refresh coming but whatever C so we'll know for now so I'm
going to do the 1100t versus the Intel
Core i 52500 k now the reason that I'm
using these two particular chips is that
they are fairly equivalently priced at this time so there is no uh price to
Performance ratio argument to be made really I mean the 2500k has to win by
about 10% just to break even so uh yeah
let's see how this goes this is going to be mostly Graphics Bound in spite of the
fact fact that I'm running quad SLI with 590s cuz I am going to be running fairly
intensive games I may add some more games to the test Suite but let's just
see how things go and uh this will be interesting I've uh I've wondered this
for a long time how do these two platforms compare against each other in
a truly equivalent scenario oh yeah for the Intel uh CPU I will be using the
z68a gd80 as my motherboard of choice so
I've loaded on the Intel platform now this is a Z6 68 platform but I will not
be using the onboard uh
Graphics at all so I'm going to be disabling it because turning on virtue
actually will impact graphics performance somewhat while it will
increase video encoding speed through supported program so I'm just going for
peer graphics performance we're assuming this is for a gaming system given that
there are dual GTX 590s in it so I've finished my 1100t results and I will be
following up now with my 2500k results I wanted to give you guys a little bit of
info first though so for all of these I'm running at 2560
x600 and I'm going with my usual settings so that means for example
Witcher 2 I'm not using the very highest setting I'm using High uh for example uh
Battlefield Bad Company 2 Forex antialiasing 8times AF uh Fear 3 I had
to turn off AA even though normally I use it at 2560 x600 I was getting only
about 12 FPS which is not enough for me to play through my run through with the
1100t so I'm turning off antialiasing that made a big difference to
Performance so we'll see how that goes crisis 2 I am using the
um shoot I can't remember for the life of me oh yeah the the second the second
highest that's right and then Dirt 3 I have it on Ultra so here we go 2500k
testing upcoming quad SLI is working let's see how this goes one other thing
to mention actually Mafia 2 I am using Apex physics on high 8X AF and anti-al
lasing is set to on so I'm using NVIDIA
cards might as well crank up the physx all right so I have my results with the
2500k this is all using the same graphical settings so in Dirt 3 we see a
12.5% increase in performance so this is about what I would expect given the CPU
costs about 10 to 12% more okay in
crisis 2 we see a 35.5% difference in performance I mean
62.5 frames per second is substantially more playable than 46.8 just due to the
fact that you're not going to see those same dips um Witcher two we saw just a
very insubstantial increase in performance so we're obviously not very
CPU bound here uh fear three now this one's funny I'm going to go back I'm
going to put the 1100t with the 990 FX back on the test bench and I'm going to
run it again just to be sure but I did run into some weirdness on the AMD
platform with fear 3 where when I was running
anti-aliasing uh the performance was about a third of this it was very very
low and just turning off AA brought us up to here whereas on the Intel platform
with with zero times anti-aliasing I didn't see any any weirdness in terms of
performance Fear 3 is not a super demanding game so even at 2560 x600 I
was expecting more like this number and that's what I got so I'll rerun it just
to just to see Battlefield Bad Company 2 it's about par for the course and then
Mafia 2 uh maybe due to the processor
intensive nature of it with all the articles and whatnot and the CPU still
has to help out the GPU with that so we ended up seeing a 40 approximately 40%
increase in gaming performance going to a 2500k from an 1100t with GTX
590s so let's um you know what I'm actually going to since I have to go
throw the other platform back on anyway what maybe what I'll do is I'll run uh
I'll run one more game here just cuz it's not quite super super late yet so I
can do a little bit more testing for you guys so thinking maybe I'll do um Lost
Planet 2 yeah let's do Lost Planet 2 so I made myself a smoothie and still at
work here so I ran Metro 2033 and Lost
Planet 2 so Metro 2033 actually showed
the 2500k losing this is the first time I've seen that and then Lost Planet 2
showed a 20% victory for the 2500k now
Fear 3 I I put that back on Fear 3 has
um exhibited exactly the same behavior second time around so the 2500k even
with four times anti-aliasing still manages a better frame rate than fear 3
on the 1100t without anti-aliasing so thinking I mean SLI support is pretty
new for AMD platform so maybe there's an issue with the SLI driver what I think
I'm going to do well not I think I'm going to do what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to take a 68 oh 68 I
don't even have a 68 well I do have a 6870 but I don't have it on me so
6970 there we go so I'm run 69 70s In
Fear 3 alone with the same graphic settings 0 x anti-aliasing a single card
I don't think it's going to run that well anyway and then I'm going to run that on both platforms and I'm going to
see if it's CPU related or if it's
related to the quad SLI driver all right
well it seems to be a weird driver issue in retrospect maybe I should have chosen
a more normal Graphics configuration like maybe uh GTX 580 SLI or something
like that I couldn't use 6970 Crossfire because I know crisis 2 behaves very
strangely with it from some other benchmarking I did this weekend anyway
you can see here the 1100t with the 6970 gets 86.2
FPS uh uh at that setting at 2560 x600
with this yeah so so that's a substantially less powerful
configuration it has like about one qu the GPU processing power so now we're
going to take the 2500k run it with the 6970 see how it comes out and that is
what we will take to be our performance difference for fear
3 well that was rather anticlimactic after all that fear 3 is a dead tie so
thank you for checking out my coverage of the 2500 K versus the 1100t in Quad
SLI and In Fear 3 running a 6970 don't
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