Today is AMD’s big chance to prove the value of its FX-8350 in a gaming environment, particularly with a price tag far lower than the competition from Intel. You see, it might appear that Intel has an advantage in our test because we picked its highest-end Ivy Bridge-based chip (the same opportunity given to AMD, by the way). But the price difference between the two doesn't escape us. Intel will need to justify its higher price in relation to the FX-8350.
But first, a look at power consumption and efficiency.

The FX-8350's stock power consumption doesn't look too terrible compared to Intel's, even though it's indeed higher. But we don't get the whole story from this chart, either. We didn't see AMD's chip running at its rated 4 GHz when it was under duress at stock settings. Rather, it dropped both its multiplier and voltage level under an eight-thread Prime95 workload to stay within its rated power envelope. Throttling artificially curbs the CPU's power consumption, and the big increases we see when the Vishera-based processor is overclocked come from fixed multiplier and voltage settings.
At the same time, games don't really utilize the FX-8350's ability to handle eight threads concurrently, and consequently never seem to trigger the same throttling mechanism. Also interesting is that the FX-8350, at its stock voltage setting, often exceeds the 1.35 V we set manually for overclocking. That explains why system power consumption doesn't change much between the stock and overclocked GPU load tests.

As mentioned, the stock FX-8350 doesn't throttle at all during gaming, since most titles aren't able to fully tax the chip. In fact, games actually enjoy a benefit from Turbo Core technology, which takes the CPU to 4.2 GHz. AMD’s biggest problem in the performance chart, then, is that Intel walks away with a noticeably higher average.

Using the average power consumption and average performance of all four configurations as the average for our efficiency chart, AMD's FX-8350 generates around two-thirds as much performance per watt compared to Intel's Core i7-3770K. If you’d like to run these calculations yourself, please note that we zeroed-out the average by subtracting one (100%) from the charted values.
- Chasing Bottlenecks To Eyefinity (But Not Beyond)
- Test Settings And Benchmarks
- Results: 3DMark, Aliens Vs. Predator, And Metro 2033
- Metro 2033, Second By Second
- Results: Battlefield 3, F1 2012, And Skyrim
- Battlefield 3, Frame By Frame
- Skyrim, Frame By Frame
- Power And Efficiency
- Can AMD's FX Keep Up With Its Radeon HD 7970?
What you're paying a premium for (it seems,) is a fluid experience. If you buy an Nvidia SLI/Intel combo, your wallet will take a hit, but you're in for less stutter. Go for all AMD crossfire/CPU, and you might just notice the occasional stutter - Not a problem for casual gamers, but a bit of a nuisance when you're twitch gaming. My aging hardware often causes problems in BF3 - flipping round a corner, spinning round etc - God help you if your GPU freezes for just a split second.
Is there a cunning (or daft) reason that Nvidia cards wouldn't work with AMD processors? If not then wouldn't it make sense to test that too - perhaps go down the route of seeing what the slowest CPU from each side is that gets up to a certain level (either absolute rates or a percentage of the top Intel result or somesuch)
I totally agree with this. Nvidia should have been tested as well.
That's what it looks like to me.
A2 can go up to about 60fps depending on the mission but it seems the AI and some other stuff is very processor heavy (and apparently it doesn't work as well on AMD CPUs anyway) which results in the GPU only being used 30-40%. Some of the worst missions seem to be the official campaigns, which apparently use a lot of scripting and drag it down to 17fps at times.
BS2 never goes above about 40fps and drops to about 25fps or lower whenever there's several other plane/helo models in view, such as flying towards an airfield and again is only using about 40% of the GPU most of the time. Being a 64-bit game, it was also disappointing to find it only uses about 2GB of my 16GB RAM, so I made a 11GB RAMDisk with it instead to make it load faster and eliminate the stuttering/jitters.
To be honest its' rather irritating when you have seen the video more than once, and it keeps on opening every time you just want to read a review. I respect the need to raise advertising revenue especially in these difficult times, I just find the way the video content automatically loads to be somewhat frustrating.
Thank you.
I know for one that i do. Yes i have 2 x 7950s in c/f. do i want more than one monitor no... Do i want to game at 5760 x 1080.. err no i dont..
and the Sabertooth Z77 is a Pci-e 3.0
For equal comparison they needed the Sabertooth 990FX R2.0 Gen3.
the difference from the Sabertooth 990fx (B.1604) and Saberooth R2.0 Gen3 (B.0305)
is about 10%~20% (it differs a lot per website reviews in, Games, Resolutions)
Not to be a conspiracy nut but the reviews should have known this from the start.
not sure if they are going down hill with people or if they made an honest mistake.