AMD A8-3850 vs Phenom II X6 1100T With Radeon 6990 Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
1,083 words · ~5 min read
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All right, guys. I got a good one for you. I'm going to take the Phantom 2X6
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1100T and I'm going to take two Radeon
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HD 6970s. Okay. Yes. Yes. This is a
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6950, but just to prove that I have
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successfully unlocked the card. You can see here both GPUs are identical under
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GPUZ. So, I do have them performing at 100% 6970 speeds. And I'm going to be
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comparing the 1100T on the 890 FX
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platform. See, I've got a Crosshair 4 formula there. And I'm going to compare
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it against the A75 platform
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and AMD's new A8 APU. So, I'm going to
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find out what kind of a performance difference there is between their new
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APU platform, which does have slightly higher performance per clock than at
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least the Athlon series. So, it should be pretty close to a Phenom 2, okay, in
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terms of clock forc clock performance, but this is a quad core. And on the
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higherend platforms, you can get six cores now and eight cores coming soon.
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So, let's see how this goes. I'm going to be testing a variety of current
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titles including Crisis 2, DirectX11,
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Witcher 2, Dirt 3, Fear 3, Battlefield Bad Company 2, and Civ 5. Don't mind the
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other things on here, that's going to be for something else. Small change to the
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methodology, guys. I'm going to be using my 6990 because Crisis 2, apparently, in
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spite of using the 11.6 six drivers, the latest uh profiles, and the latest patch
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of Crisis 2, including DirectX11 and high-res textures.
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Still doesn't work in Crossfire. Go figure. So, these are all the runs of
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Crisis 2 I did trying to go. Okay, single card, multicard, single card. Oh,
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you guys can't see the results that I'm bringing up. So, you can see that we're
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getting some pretty good consistency there. In spite of the fact that I was
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switching between a single 6T970 and dual 6T970. So, I throw the 6T990 on
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there. All of a sudden, I get 49.5 FPS.
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So, we're going to stick with that for our testing. So, I'll be testing that against the 1100T or with the 1100T
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against the A75 platform. So, I've got
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myself a benchmarking snack bowl. Unrelated to that though, I have
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finished running my tests for the 1100T which was here. So that's running on the
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Crosshair 4 formula with the 6T990. And then on my other platform, I've got the
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AMD Lano A83850 running with exactly the same test bench
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with the 6990. So, I ran a variety of modern games, and what I found is that
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with an identical configuration. Remember, with the APU, we're only
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taking advantage of the CPU component of it because the onboard graphics turns
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off if you install anything higherend
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than about a shoot, what is this? Turks, I think it's 6670.
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So, if you install anything higherend than something that looks about like
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this, it is going to turn itself off because it's not going to provide any
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additional benefit in dual graphics mode. Okay. So, we're looking at its
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performance strictly as a gaming CPU against the 1100T, which is AMD's cream
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of the cream. Now, I think you'll find that in terms of price toerformance
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ratio, it's pretty darn impressive. So, the games I tested were Crisis 2. This
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is DirectX11 with the high resolution texture pack. So, everything is maxed
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out in this game. In fact, if I bring up
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my little email that I made for myself outlining all of my benchmarking
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settings. Uh, yeah, there we go. Okay, I don't have Crisis 2 in there, but whatever. It's It's all maximum uh with
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the DirectX11 in the high-res pack. Actually, no, I think I'm at Okay, give
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me a sec. Okay, sorry guys. For Crisis 2, I'm using all extreme presets and
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then um I'm running at obviously 1920x
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1080 and DirectX11 is enabled and the uh
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uber high-res textures are enabled. So for Crisis 2, the 1100T performed about
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10% faster than the A8 APU with exactly
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the same configuration. The Witcher 2 was much closer. It was only about a 5%
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difference, which is pretty much, I'd say, within the margin of error because
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I am doing game runthroughs. I am not doing canned benchmarks on Crisis 2,
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Witcher 2, Fear 3, and Battlefield Bad Company 2. So, there is some variance,
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although I do my best to run through exactly the same way every time. Now,
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Dirt 3 was one where the 1100T just blew
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away the A8PU. It performed about 30%
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better. So, 25 30% better. And Fear 3
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was one where they were very close. So, we start to see a pattern here. Uh, come
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in and have a closer look at the graph. So, we start to see a pattern here that says 76.2, 2 by the way, sorry guys,
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where any game that is CPUbound or very multi-core aware is going to perform
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better on the 1100T platform, whereas any game where we're already quite
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graphically bound, such as The Witcher 2 or Fear 3, we're not going to see much
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of a difference in performance. Battlefield Bad Company 2, um, perhaps
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due to the increased CPU, uh, load in that game, it does a lot of physics
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effects on the CPU, performed about 20 22% better on the 1100T. And finally,
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Civ 5 performed about 10% better. And Civ 5, I was using a late game view uh
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of a game that I actually played. I have about 40 cities. So, what I do is I
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center it over one of my cities and then pull out all the way and see what the
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frame rate is in the corner. So, thank you guys for checking out my little
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gaming performance showdown between AMD's highestend CPU and then their new
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just phenomenal, although I can't really call it phenomenal because it's not even
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a Phenom. Um, wa that's mind-blowing,
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right? And their new APU. So, stay tuned for more APU content around the 3850.
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