[citation][nom]jackbling[/nom]Lol, i typically type amd, but in my mind that cards are still ATI. With the exception of APU's, AMD procs just cant compete; in the interest of all of our wallets, i hope Piledriver owns.[/citation]
Did you ever hear of the CPU/NB frequency and PSCheck? The CPU/NB frequency controls (among other things) the L3 cache frequency and overclocking it significantly has a substantial effect on performance per core per Hz of the CPU frequency. Using PSCheck to cut-down on the second core fo each module lets the fist core mroe or less get the front end all to itself, another significant performance per core per Hz boost at a given CPU clock frequency.
FX can almsot match SB and can easily make up for the now minor loss in performance per Hz per core with significantly higher frequencies. The FX-81xx CPUs can easily hang with even the K edition i5s and i7s in OC versus OC, greatly because of the PSCheck configuration being able to make the second core of each module either be disabled (using roughly zero power) or run at very low clock frequencies/voltage and thus very low power when not running all eight cores at load.
AMD's CPUs can compete quite well, you just havr to know how to use them. AMD obviously doesn't know how to set up their CPUs properly, so it's no surprise that most people (even within the tech communities) don't know of this either.