Intel vs AMD Gaming CPU Showdown 2500K vs 1100T with Quad SLI Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,463 words · ~7 min read
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AMD finally has a high-end a truly
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high-end platform this so this is the 990fx Crosshair 5 formula with an 1100t
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8 gigs of RAM a 120 gig SSD it's my
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usual test platform except it has two
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GTX 590s on it so this is pretty much
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the the fastest gaming machine you can
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build on an AMD
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CPU well 6990 would be pretty much equivalent so so it'd be an equivalent
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fastest gaming machine so what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be looking
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at once and for all which is better for
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gaming AMD or Intel CPUs at least from
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this generation which won't be relevant uh very soon with bulldozzer coming out
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and Intel having a refresh coming but whatever C so we'll know for now so I'm
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going to do the 1100t versus the Intel
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Core i 52500 k now the reason that I'm
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using these two particular chips is that
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they are fairly equivalently priced at this time so there is no uh price to
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Performance ratio argument to be made really I mean the 2500k has to win by
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about 10% just to break even so uh yeah
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let's see how this goes this is going to be mostly Graphics Bound in spite of the
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fact fact that I'm running quad SLI with 590s cuz I am going to be running fairly
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intensive games I may add some more games to the test Suite but let's just
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see how things go and uh this will be interesting I've uh I've wondered this
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for a long time how do these two platforms compare against each other in
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a truly equivalent scenario oh yeah for the Intel uh CPU I will be using the
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z68a gd80 as my motherboard of choice so
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I've loaded on the Intel platform now this is a Z6 68 platform but I will not
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be using the onboard uh
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Graphics at all so I'm going to be disabling it because turning on virtue
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actually will impact graphics performance somewhat while it will
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increase video encoding speed through supported program so I'm just going for
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peer graphics performance we're assuming this is for a gaming system given that
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there are dual GTX 590s in it so I've finished my 1100t results and I will be
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following up now with my 2500k results I wanted to give you guys a little bit of
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info first though so for all of these I'm running at 2560
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x600 and I'm going with my usual settings so that means for example
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Witcher 2 I'm not using the very highest setting I'm using High uh for example uh
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Battlefield Bad Company 2 Forex antialiasing 8times AF uh Fear 3 I had
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to turn off AA even though normally I use it at 2560 x600 I was getting only
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about 12 FPS which is not enough for me to play through my run through with the
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1100t so I'm turning off antialiasing that made a big difference to
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Performance so we'll see how that goes crisis 2 I am using the
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um shoot I can't remember for the life of me oh yeah the the second the second
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highest that's right and then Dirt 3 I have it on Ultra so here we go 2500k
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testing upcoming quad SLI is working let's see how this goes one other thing
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to mention actually Mafia 2 I am using Apex physics on high 8X AF and anti-al
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lasing is set to on so I'm using NVIDIA
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cards might as well crank up the physx all right so I have my results with the
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2500k this is all using the same graphical settings so in Dirt 3 we see a
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12.5% increase in performance so this is about what I would expect given the CPU
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costs about 10 to 12% more okay in
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crisis 2 we see a 35.5% difference in performance I mean
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62.5 frames per second is substantially more playable than 46.8 just due to the
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fact that you're not going to see those same dips um Witcher two we saw just a
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very insubstantial increase in performance so we're obviously not very
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CPU bound here uh fear three now this one's funny I'm going to go back I'm
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going to put the 1100t with the 990 FX back on the test bench and I'm going to
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run it again just to be sure but I did run into some weirdness on the AMD
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platform with fear 3 where when I was running
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anti-aliasing uh the performance was about a third of this it was very very
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low and just turning off AA brought us up to here whereas on the Intel platform
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with with zero times anti-aliasing I didn't see any any weirdness in terms of
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performance Fear 3 is not a super demanding game so even at 2560 x600 I
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was expecting more like this number and that's what I got so I'll rerun it just
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to just to see Battlefield Bad Company 2 it's about par for the course and then
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Mafia 2 uh maybe due to the processor
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intensive nature of it with all the articles and whatnot and the CPU still
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has to help out the GPU with that so we ended up seeing a 40 approximately 40%
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increase in gaming performance going to a 2500k from an 1100t with GTX
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590s so let's um you know what I'm actually going to since I have to go
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throw the other platform back on anyway what maybe what I'll do is I'll run uh
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I'll run one more game here just cuz it's not quite super super late yet so I
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can do a little bit more testing for you guys so thinking maybe I'll do um Lost
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Planet 2 yeah let's do Lost Planet 2 so I made myself a smoothie and still at
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work here so I ran Metro 2033 and Lost
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Planet 2 so Metro 2033 actually showed
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the 2500k losing this is the first time I've seen that and then Lost Planet 2
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showed a 20% victory for the 2500k now
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Fear 3 I I put that back on Fear 3 has
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um exhibited exactly the same behavior second time around so the 2500k even
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with four times anti-aliasing still manages a better frame rate than fear 3
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on the 1100t without anti-aliasing so thinking I mean SLI support is pretty
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new for AMD platform so maybe there's an issue with the SLI driver what I think
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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
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don't even have a 68 well I do have a 6870 but I don't have it on me so
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6970 there we go so I'm run 69 70s In
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Fear 3 alone with the same graphic settings 0 x anti-aliasing a single card
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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
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see if it's CPU related or if it's
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related to the quad SLI driver all right
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well it seems to be a weird driver issue in retrospect maybe I should have chosen
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a more normal Graphics configuration like maybe uh GTX 580 SLI or something
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like that I couldn't use 6970 Crossfire because I know crisis 2 behaves very
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strangely with it from some other benchmarking I did this weekend anyway
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you can see here the 1100t with the 6970 gets 86.2
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FPS uh uh at that setting at 2560 x600
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with this yeah so so that's a substantially less powerful
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configuration it has like about one qu the GPU processing power so now we're
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going to take the 2500k run it with the 6970 see how it comes out and that is
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what we will take to be our performance difference for fear
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3 well that was rather anticlimactic after all that fear 3 is a dead tie so
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thank you for checking out my coverage of the 2500 K versus the 1100t in Quad
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SLI and In Fear 3 running a 6970 don't
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forget to subscribe to Linus Tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other
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