Radeon HD 7970 vs GTX 680 Performance on AMD Bulldozer FX-8150 CPU Review Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,250 words · ~6 min read
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you guys would probably be very surprised to hear how many people ask me
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if there's an advantage to running AMD radon cards on an AMD platform versus uh
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running a GeForce card on an AMD platform and I can tell you guys now
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before I actually finish running the benchmarks no there is not you the CPU
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performance times sort of the GPU performance
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multiplier you know factor in any bottlenecking that's occurring where one
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of them is not feeding the other quickly enough that's pretty much how perform
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how much performance you get you know PCI Express this is you know a this is a
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an industry standard and CPU performance
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is CPU performance and GPU performance is GPU performance however for those of
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you out here there who are running AMD based systems I've decided to do some
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bulldozer benchmarks with the GTX 680
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versus the radon hd7970 so what I want
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to achieve in all of this is to give the AMD guys a good idea of how these two
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cards will perform now I am see I don't know what to tell you
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guys about this CPU this is an fx 8140 which is some like weird CPU that
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doesn't seem to be existing anywhere and
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I don't know if it's ever even going to be released but what I've done is I've clocked it at 4 GHz so that should be
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fairly equivalent to something like an8 50 in terms of performance in most games
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4 GHz is an easy overclock so just bear that in mind we're going to be comparing
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this AMD 8 core at 4 GHz to my stock
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speed 3930k platform and then we're also going
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to be comparing this CPU performance with the 7970 to this CPU's performance
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with the GTX 680 so just bear that in mind in all of my results and stay tuned
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here guys just so you guys know if you didn't
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watch my regular performance review with my 3930k platform on LGA 2011 I using
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all Ultra maximum settings other than maxing out the anti-aliasing which I've
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got pegged at 4X which for me is a pretty comfortable setting at 1080p I
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find that reduces most of the jaggies for me personally so since I'm the one
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doing the video I guess I get to pick things like that uh so yeah we're at
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1080p we're at Ultra or high or whatever
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they want to call it settings across the board on all of these games
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and here I go so now I'm testing the GTX 680 on this same
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platform and uh be prepared crazy stuff's going to
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happen all right guys well results are done so I guess you can kind of hang
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with me while I uh while I rearranged the spreadsheet a little bit so I'm just
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going to hide some of the less relevant rows and we're just going to stay
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focused on bulldozer 680 versus
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7970 and then we're also going
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to pair all of these down to just the
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680 and the 7970 on the 3930k platform so these are
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using all of the same testing methodologies other than changing the
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CPU and changing the RAM so the 3930k
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has 16 gigs of RAM and this one has only 8 gigs of RAM although I really can't
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imagine that'll make a difference in anything other than power consumption so
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the 3930k should be at somewhat of a disadvantage because it does have more
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RAM on board
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it other than that I think we're pretty darn near identical here this is a
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Crosshair 5 formula and never mentioned that before from ASUS and I think that's
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that's that's pretty much it so here we go so idle power is pretty darn close I
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would say this is within margin of error for both of these systems so they're
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yeah they're very close that way and once again I can't say necessarily that
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my results are you know I should put like quotes here yeah it's an fx
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8150 because this is a 95 watt TDP CPU
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so I don't know how much of a difference that's going to make to things like idle power consumption so grain of salt guys
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grain of salt 3D Mark 11 scores are pretty much not affected this is yeah
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very very close but we do see a slight
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performance decrease on the AMD platform over here I see I didn't take temp
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readings this time around cuz this is just card temperatures I don't really care about that the second time around
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for Battlefield 3 you can see performance is pretty near identical
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across the two platforms so in very graphically demanding games you can
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often encounter scenarios where just because the CPU is slower doesn't mean
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that it will perform any differently in that game as long as you have the uh the
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graphical horsepower um another thing to bear in mind is that Battlefield 3's
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frostbite engine is heavily multi-threading aware so the fact that
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this is eight cores versus six may be making a difference for it hard to say
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at this point in time crisis 2 we see a fairly significant drop in performance
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going from the 3930k to the FX 8150 we
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see about 10% and this is consistent on
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both the GTX 680 and the 7970 The
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Witcher 2 sees very similar performance I would consider this to be sort of
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pretty close to margin of error here guys Dirt 3 uh sees a significant
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performance drop on both the 680 and the 7970 moving to the other platform
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although the 680 takes a bigger hit than the 7970 for some reason Batman Arkham
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City is pretty darn close um especially
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on the 680 and takes a bit of a hit on the 7970 finally skyum just falls off a
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cliff with the bulldozer CPU versus using the uh 3930k so you can see this
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is just a disaster overall power consumption is fairly
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you know well higher on the AMD platform
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pretty much across the board so you can see that it must be somewhere in the CPU
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or the motherboard probably the CPU given that bulldozer is a bit of a power
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hog uh we are using more power than the 3930k Intel's 6 core unlocked processor
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on the LGA 2011 platform and I think that pretty much
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wraps it up so in conclusion no there's
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no real advantage to pairing this with with this other than that you get like
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this wicked like matching color schemy thing going on with like your red
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motherboard and your red AMD performance Edition RAM and Ron graphics card I mean
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that's cool that's fine and that is a perfectly legitimate reason if you ask
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me to you know buy one component over another I'm totally shallow like that
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but in terms of technical practical reasons you're there is no issue pairing
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up a GeForce with an AMD chip or a radon
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with an Intel chip thank you for checking out this episode of lus tech tips don't forget to subscribe for more
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