Gadgetory

AMD finally has a high-end a truly high-end platform so this is the 990 FX crosshair 5 formula within 1100 t 8 gigs of ram a 120 gig SSD it's my usual test platform except it has two GTX 590 s on it so this is pretty much the fastest gaming machine you can build on an AMD CPU while 6990 would be pretty much equivalent so it so it'd be an equivalent fastest gaming machine so what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be looking at once and for all which is better for gaming AMD or Intel CPUs at least from this generation which won't be relevant very soon with bulldoze are coming out and until having a refresh coming but whatever cable so we'll know for now so I'm going to do the 1100 T versus the Intel Core i5 2500 K now the reason that I'm using these two particular chips is that they are fairly equivalently priced at this time so there is no price to performance ratio argument to be made really I mean the 2500 K has to win by about 10% just to break even so yeah let's see how this goes this is going to be mostly graphics bound in spite of the fact that I'm running Quad SLI with 5 90s because I am going to be running fairly intensive games I may add some more games to the test suite but let's just see how things go and this will be interesting I've wondered this for a long time how do these two platforms compare against each other in a truly equivalent scenario oh yeah for the Intel CPU I will be using the z68 a GD 80 as my motherboard of choice so I've loaded on the Intel platform now this is a z68 platform but I will not be using the onboard graphics at all so I'm going to be disabling it because turning on virtue actually will impact graphics performance somewhat while it will increase video encoding speed through supported program so I'm just going for pure graph Fix performance for assuming this is for a gaming system given that there are dual GTX 590 s in it so I've finished my 1100 T results and I will be following up now with my 2500 K results I wanted to give you guys a little bit of info first though so for all of these I'm running at 2560 by 1600 and I'm going with my usual settings so that means for example which or two I'm not using the very highest setting I'm using high for example Battlefield Bad Company 2 4x anti-aliasing 8 x AF fear 3 I had to turn off a even though normally I use it at 2560 by 1600 I was getting only about 12 FPS which is not enough for me to play through my run through with the 1100 T so I'm turning off anti-aliasing that made a big difference to performance so we'll see how that goes Crysis 2 I am using the shoot I can't remember for the life of me oh yeah the second the second highest that's right and then dirt 3 I have it on ultra so here we go 2500 K testing upcoming Quad SLI is working let's see how this goes one other thing to mention actually mafia 2 I am using Apex physics on high 8x AF and anti-aliasing is set to on so I'm using Nvidia cards might as well crank up the physics alright so I have my results with the 2500 K this is all using these same graphical settings so in dirt 3 we see a 12.5% increase in performance this is about what I would expect given the CPU costs about 10 to 12 percent more okay in Crysis 2 we see a thirty five point five percent difference in performance I mean sixty two point five frames per second is substantially more playable than forty six point eight just due to the fact that you're not going to see the same dips which or two we saw just a very in substantial increase in performance so we're obviously not very CPU bound here fear 3 now this one's funny I'm going to go back I'm going to put the 1102 with the 990 FX back on the test bench and I'm going to run it again just to be sure but I did run into some weirdness on the AMD platform with fear 3 where when I was running anti-aliasing the performance was about a third of this it was very very low and just turn aw say a brought us up to here where as on the Intel platform with with zero times anti-aliasing I didn't see any any weirdness in terms of performance fear 3 is not a super demanding game so even at 2560 by 1600 I was expecting more like this number and that's what I got so I'll rerun it just to just to see Battlefield Bad Company 2 what is about par for the course and then mafia 2 I'll maybe due to the processor intensive nature of it with all the particles and whatnot and the CPU still has to help out the GPU with that so we ended up seeing a 40 approximately 40% increase in gaming performance going to a 2500 Kay from an 1,100 tea with GTX 590 s so let's sum you know what I'm actually good at since I have to go for the other platform back on anyway well maybe what I'll do is I'll run on one more game here just cuz it's not quite super super late yet so I can do some a little bit more testing for you guys so I'm thinking maybe I'll do Lost Planet 2 yeah let's do Lost Planet 2 so I made myself a smoothie and still at work here so I ran Metro 2033 AM Lost Planet 2 so Metro 2033 actually showed the 2500 K losing this is the first time I've seen that and then Lost Planet 2 showed a 20% victory for the 2500 K now tier 3 I've put that back on fear 3 has exhibited exactly the same behavior second time around so the 2500 K even with 4 x anti-aliasing still manages a better frame rate than fear 3 on the 1100 to you without anti-aliasing so thinking I mean SLI supports pretty new for AMD platform so maybe there's an issue with the SLI driver what I think I'm going to do well not I think I'm gonna do what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to take a 6800 68 7 even have a 60 years well I do have a 68 70 but I don't have it on me so 69 70 there we go so I'm going to run 69 70s in fear 3 alone with the same graphics setting 0x anti-aliasing that single card 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 see if it's CPU related or if it's related to the Quad SLI driver alright well seems to be a weird driver issue in retrospect maybe I should have chosen a more normal graphics configuration like maybe GTX 580 SLI or something like that I couldn't use 6970 crossfire because I know Crysis 2 behaves very strangely with it from some other benchmarking I did this weekend anyway you can see here the 1100 t with the 69 70 gets 86.2 FPS at that setting at 2560 by 1600 with this Yap so so that's a substantially less powerful configuration it has like about 1/4 the GPU processing power so now we're going to take the 2500 K run it with the 69 70 see how it comes out and that is what we will take to be our performance difference for fear 3 well that was rather anticlimactic after all that fear 3 is a dead tie so thank you for checking out my coverage of the 2500 K versus the 1100 T in Quad SLI and in fear 3 running a 69 70 don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos