Eight Core Gaming PC Showdown - AMD vs Intel!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,394 words · ~6 min read
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recently we had a look at how you could piece together a pretty darn powerful
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eight core gaming rig on the cheap with some older server Hardware namely a pair
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of quad core Intel xeons and some server grade ECC ddr2 RAM and a little bit of
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creative modding but some of the fans made it pretty compelling that there was
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an argument for hey instead of drilling a block of wood to use as a motherboard
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Mount and loing off a part of a shiny gtx980 why not just use an 8 AMD desktop
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CPU instead indeed why not stay tuned to
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find out how our server style Frankenstein rig held up against an AMD
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fx8350 freshbooks is the super simple invoicing solution that lets you get
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organized save time and get paid faster click now to try it for free so while
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the twin Zeon processors the ECC RAM and the Server Motherboard only set us back
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around $150 total AMD's most popular 8 core CPU
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the fx8350 is currently going for
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170 by itself on new EG and not all that
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much cheaper on the used Market with cheaper am3 plus motherboards going for
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around 50 bucks on the same site and 16 GB of DDR3 memory going for about 60 all
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of this retaining much of its value on the used Market you're looking at nearly
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double the cost for the desktop AMD platform but of course you do get quite
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a bit extra functionality for this added cost even lower-end currently available
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motherboards support now standard features like USB 3.0 multiple PCI
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Express slots and 6 gbit per second SATA
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connections by contrast our server board only has a measly pair of USB 2.0 ports
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I mean even the freaking Raspberry Pi has more than that one PCIe slot making
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any further expansion impossible once you stick in a graphics card and only
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support sat of revision 2 speeds we also
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needed to separate EPS power connectors with the server board we used so you may
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need to find a power supply that has a pair of these as well and obviously you
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get the luxury of being able to use your choice of modern CPU Cooler in a real
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actual ATX case unless you like that sort of cyberpunk shady ghetto style
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piece of tech that was just thrown together kind of look which honestly I I
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must admit I kind of have a soft spot for so I would understand but all of
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that aside performance is what matters most and we put both of our eight core
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setups through a full battery of comparison tests if you're curious about
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the exact parts we use for these test benches you can see them on the screen
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right now first up we looked at transfer speeds on our Samsung 850 Pro SSD using
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the Blackmagic disc speed tests on our AMD bench we got a healthy 513 megabyte
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pers second read speed and a 465 mbes
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per second right about what we'd expect from a modern SATA 3 Drive however our
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server board was a completely different story as on it we mustered only
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134 and 128 megabytes per second on read and WR
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respectively even though the board is supposed to support say to two speeds of
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up to 300 megabytes per second through its connectors although there may be a
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way to make this work more quickly we couldn't find anything in the bio that
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would allow us to increase the speed there seems to be one Post online where
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one dude said that he modified it to work but doesn't actually say how so we
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might be able to chalk this up to another one of those server Parts can be
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screwy and hard to configure moments that said if you do want to try out the
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Server Motherboard as a gaming rig concept you might want to take the time
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to locate a board that you know will support SATA 3 speeds as the system was
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noticeably a little slower in common tasks like browsing through Windows
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Explorer moving on to synthetic benchmarks we saw the AMD desktop setup
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perform 40 to 60% faster in a Seuss real
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bench Suite which includes image editing video rendering and multitasking
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elements the fx8350 based system also
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beat on our dual zon setup by about 18%
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in the cinebench CPU test and also won the open Gil test which renders a scene
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of a car chase by nearly 40 FPS but
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would this translate to huge gains in real world gaming situations the two
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systems didn't show too much of a difference in our Far Cry 3 Far Cry 4
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sorry and Crisis 3 benchmarks with our AMD desktop bench only gaining between 1
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and 3 frames per second at 4K however
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when we switch to City's skylines a much more CPU bound title the difference was
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massive our fx8350 system nearly doubled
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the performance of our dual xon setup so with these results does it still make
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sense to go for the cheaper server setup if you can get your hands on them it
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might if all you're doing with your PC is gaming and you want to keep your
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platform costs as low as possible and allocate more of your budget to
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something like say a nice graphics card of course that depends on what games
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you're going to be playing so don't forget that too as CPU bound titles will
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see a significant performance hit on the old server Hardware Although our fx8350
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platform costs about twice the price we got roughly double the performance in
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City skylines offsetting the additional cash you'd have to Fork out add in a
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significantly faster performance and other CPU intensive tasks and even
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general computing as well as many more connectivity options and a more
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traditional platform with desktop Class 8 core processor and it looks well worth
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the additional cost especially if you won't have to spend a ton of time
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configuring a server board which isn't exactly designed to be user friendly all
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the time but let's be real for a moment if the tinkerer in you really wants to
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try out this kind of a cost cutting challenge that's awesome go for it or if
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an 8350 just isn't in your budget it's certainly possible to have a satisfying
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gaming experience on some old Zeon for a really really good price just remember
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that it might take a little bit more patience upes has a wide variety of
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over at upd desk.com Linus Linked In the video description down below thanks for
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