Gadgetory

guys this is the MSI 990 FX AGD 80 and it is an a3 plus motherboard featuring full support for a salon across fire X and AMD bulldozer eight core CPUs this is an fx-8150 installed on a crosshair five formula now the crosshair 5 formula is the board that was used by 99% of the reviewers out there for their bulldozer launch coverage so what I'm aiming to do here is to find out whether the crosshair 5 formula will perform any different from the MSI equivalent high-end gaming skew with a single sixty nine seventy eight gigs of ddr3 memory and an 81 50 FX eight core CPU from AMD so I have done my first set of run throughs now I can't get the witcher 2 running properly right now it's something to do with the game updating and my save files won't load and so i'm going to have to examine that but for now i want to bring you the results that i can so what i'm going to be doing is i'm going to be running the crosshair 5 the 990 FX 8 GD 80 and then for completeness sake I'm going to throw a 2500 K into the mix and that will be on a z68 board right there so that's the z68 ad dat just to see how the 8150 compares against its closest competitor price-wise on the intel side so I've done my run through with the 990 FX ad d ad board now and see what it's called Dale Nick just so you guys know that I'm telling you what it is and I've only encountered one very curious result so on the top are my numbers with the 990 FX a and on the bottom are my numbers with the crosshair 5 so you can see these gaming numbers are very close metro 2033 is within the margin of error Battlefield Bad Company 2 within margin of error Crysis 2 within margin of error and loss yeah Lost Planet 2 is identical and finally dirt 3 is well within margin of error but Cinebench for some reason perform dramatically better on the GBA T so before I put my cindy bridge where is it 2500 K on the bench I'm going to go and I'm going to throw the across there five back on there just to give it another shot at that Cinebench benchmark let's see if maybe it was just an anomaly looks like it was purely an anomaly guys 5.8 4 is well within margin of error of 5.8 2 so I'm going to go ahead and say that these boards perform pretty much identically with the 8150 at stock speeds now I'm going to go ahead and get on with my Sandy Bridge testing well my Sandy Bridge numbers are complete so this is with the same test platform except for a different CPU and different motherboard obviously and I think the overall conclusion is that a whole lot is being made about the bulldozers performance or lack thereof against its sandy bridge counterparts but looking at the test settings that are being used in a lot of places I don't really feel they're all that realistic so for all of the games that I'm running I'm running at 1080p which is the full resolution of this monitor which most gamers are transitioning towards if they're not already using it and then I'm also running at high details with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering on in most cases and you can see here that in most of the games most of the applications I'm running my average and my minimum frames per second are very very playable at those settings so yeah this is one of the things where I'm kind of looking at it going well okay yes the 2500 K does perform better you can see there are games where it really pulls away such as Crysis 2 where we're looking at sort of outside the margin of error in terms of the performance difference somewhere in the 8 percent range Lost Planet 2 it does perform a little bit better remember that one's a canned benchmark so that should be fairly representative dirt3 it does pull ahead this is a CPU limited game and it's about 5 percent better but it doesn't perform as well and something heavily threaded like cinnamon for example I mean yes it's not that far behind considering the fact that the 2500 K is a cheaper processor than the 8150 but you also have to bear in mind that the platform is more expensive if you want to build a gaming rig like let's say dual 6970 gaming rig with high-end gaming CPU bunch ram etc etc you're looking at on the low end a 90-70 chipset for AMD or a 990 X which are both still prosper capable whereas with Intel if you want a crossfire or sli ready board you have to use a P 67 or is e 68 gorgeous or significantly more expensive so you do have to factor that in so thank you for checking out my little video where we did establish that there's really no difference in performance between 1 990 FX board and another with the bulldozer 8150 FX chip and then that the performance Delta between the 2500 K and then 8150 is while significant yes it is significant in some cases may not be a deal-breaker especially if you're running at sort of real-world resolutions in real-world games don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for unboxings reviews and other computer videos