Gadgetory

having first done some case painting and then a little building we now have two pretty cool-looking gaming rigs for the most part both systems are much the same the key difference of course being the platforms used from the red team we have the AMD FX 8350 motherboard and the blue team is being represented by the core i5 6400 and dead 170 motherboard combo in today's money the AMD system cost around eleven hundred USD to build which works out to be about 1700 AUD the Intel system on the other hand was slightly more pricey at 1150 us or almost 1800 Australian dollars keep in mind that although the core i5 6500 costs almost 60% more than the FX 8320 the total system build cost comes out at less than 10% more with the exception of the motherboard and processor the rest of the systems are much the same they were both built into the Silverstone kalalau 5 case picture a gigabytes of memory a single Radeon r9 390 the silverstone tdo to slim liquid cooler and the silverstone strider essentials 700 watt power supply the Windows 10 operating system was installed on the Samsung SSD a 50 Evo fire and gigabyte model and the Western Digital blue 4 terabyte was used as a secondary storage device both processors were overclocked though I realized that Intel has done its best to close the door on 9k overclocking so the results have been included for those that are still interested in running the previous bios obviously the Radeon r9 390 will be handling all the rendering and I've decided to test as both 1080p and 1440 pins the 1080p results should help to remove GPU bottlenecks exposing any weakness on the CPU side most gamers spending over a thousand u.s. on a gaming rig you're probably turning 1440p gaming those so those results to be included too with all that said let's move on to the benchmarks battlefield for single-player campaign isn't very CPU intensive so you might wonder why we included it the idea here will be to show a range of games some CPU intensive and some so much starting with battlefield 4 we see that even with the Radeon r9 390 SFX 8320 in Core i5 6400 deliver very similar results even when overclocked increasing the resolution from 1080p to 1440p does nothing to change the performance margins as you might expect Batman Arkham Knight is clearly a CPU intensive title and as a result the stock standard FX 8320 looks quite weak when compared to the core i5 6400 despite delivering a very playable average framerate even the minimum 54 fps is acceptable although when compared to the 106 FPS of the 6400 the 50% reduction in performance is quite shocking overclocking the FX 283 20 it helps to minimize the damage as the minimum frame rate is bolstered by 30% 271 fps increasing the resolution the 1440p helps to minimize the performance margin between the 8320 and the 6400 the average frame rates are now quite similar though the FX processor is still 33 percent slower out of the box when comparing the minimum frame rate and a little over 10% slower once overclocked like battlefield 4 the single-player portion of black ops 3 isn't particularly demanding and we see that the FX 83 20 years they would have delivered similar performance to that of the core i5 6400 increasing the resolution the 1440p doesn't really change the performance margins again we see that once overclocked the FX 8320 is able to get the most from the Radeon r9 390 in this title late last year I put together a video showcasing the overclocking performance of various non-chaotic processors and in that video the FX 8350 was also included use for testing was fallout 4 along with a few other games the fallout 4 resolves shocked a few people not because of how fast the sky processors were but rather how slow the FX 8350 was at times dipping to just 17 fps with a fury ax handling the red ring as expected a few diehard AMD fans questioned the accuracy of the results quite a bit of effort on my behalf of spent trying to improve the performance the FX system but in the end I gave up now a number of patches later we still find the FX series can't hold a candle to the sky processes in certain sections of the game the frame rates in the Boston City section of the game is significantly lower than other sections of the game even on the Intel processors still despite the heavy overclock the 4.8 gigahertz FX 8320 isn't able to overcome this issue here you'll see is increasing the resolution to 1440p does it reduce the performance of the Radeon r9 390 in this section of Fallout 4 the FX 83 20 is still dips to just 25 fps with the 28 FPS average the Cry 5 6400 also delivered virtually the same performance in both its out of the box and overclocked configurations here we see that the fallout 4 performance is significantly different to what we saw when testing in Boston as we exit the vault the FX 83 20s saw a 50 FPS minimum with an average of over 60 fps it is worth noting that the core i5 6400 out at standard operating frequencies was still faster than the overclocked FX 8320 now at 1440p we find that the fault section of the game still plays reasonably well on the FX 8320 and finally the 4.8 gigahertz overclock is able to deliver a little extra performance that said the stock core i5 6400 is still 14% faster than the heavily overclocked FX processor Just Cause 3 is another very CPU intensive video game and as such the FX 8320 really suffers here at 1080p the overclocked ffs 8320 it was good for just 51 FPS on average with a 36 FPS minimum meanwhile the 6400 never dropped below 45 FPS allowing for a 63 FPS average increasing the resolution the 1440p had little impact on the FX 8320 performance as we're already cpu limited at 1080p the core i5 6400 became noticeably slower at 1440p but was still a great deal faster than the FX processor Mad Max is a GPU limited game this is why we see the FX 8320 in Core i5 6400 providing identical performance of 1080p naturally increasing the resolution of 1440 PE does nothing to change the performance margins and again we find that the AMD and Intel processors deliver the same performance like Mad Max in battlefield 4 we find that Rainbow six siege is another game that's primarily GPU dependent as a result all configurations are able to get the most out of the Radeon r9 390 moving to 1440p removes virtually all performance margins and we see just one FPS separating the fastest configuration from the slowest the core i5 6400 enjoyed a slight performance advanced at 1080p so it has to be said that the FX 8320 was more than capable here upping the resolution to 1440p eliminated any performance variables allowing the FX 8320 to match the core i5 6400 The Witcher 3 results are probably the most shocking you've seen so far even at 4.8 gigahertz the FX 83 20 is seriously outclassed by the stock core i5 6400 which average 65 fps making it 27 percent faster overclocked the 6500 was a beast reaching an average frame rate of 86 FPS increasing the resolution 1440p narrowed the gap between the overclocked in stock Core i5 6400 configurations but it didn't help the FX 8320 close in on the 6,400 which remained almost 30% faster when comparing the average frame rate in the out-of-the-box configurations the core i5 6400 consumed just over 20% less power than the FX 83 20 once overclocked that figure increased it was crazy to see the power meter reading over 500 watts for the AMD system and just shy of 400 watts for the Intel system given the relative performance the margins were even greater when looking at the call of duty black ops 3 power figures here the core i5 6400 consumed 27% less power and over 30% less once both processors were overclocked it's hardly a surprise that the Intel skylake core i5 system delivered superior performance this should be well established now that the AMD FX range is inferior what gives the FX processor some merit is the price just 120 dollars the FX 8320 is considerably cheaper than the $190 core i5 6400 as I said earlier that makes the Intel processor almost 60% more expensive and if I were reviewing these CPUs side by sides that figure would have a huge impact however in the grand scheme of things the $70 price difference doesn't account for much less than 10% of the total build cost in fact so if I gave you the option of the red box or the blue box with the latter costing just 60% more which one would you choose just paying almost 60% more for the core i5 6400 make any difference of course not and this is the problem AMD faces for any system build exceeding 500 dollars the CPU savings becoming pretty much irrelevant beyond that point particularly given the resulting performance overclocked or not with all things considered the box is unquestionably the one I'd be recommending hopefully later in the year I'll be drawn to the red team once then lands fingers crossed right as always I'm your host Matt and I'll see you guys next time