Gaming Shoot-Out: 18 CPUs And APUs Under $200, Benchmarked

[sarinaide]

Why do they use the highest end Z77 board and with the 990FX use a UD5 when a CHV Formula Z is like in a different zip code to it. Also as awesome as the A85 Extreme 6 is, the UP4 and V-Pro's are faster A85 boards.

I think this needs to be done in tiers, honestly no person will buy that Z77 board using anything less than a i5 k based chip, so its also very non-plausible at inception. Since most were non k's why not use B75's which are aptly designed for lower cost intel platforms, oh right yes because it bottlenecks the benching.

 

[The_Trutherizer]

The UD5 motherboard you are using here was not even in that 990FX comparison - You had the UD7 there. Inversely in the Z77 mobo comparison you had a UP5 and here you have the UP7.

Just saying...

 

[sarinaide]

The Z77X UD7 is a $400 Z77 chipset board with fantastic PCI-e and DDR interface almost worth 3-5FPS alone over say the UD5H version of the same motherboard. The 990X UD5 is basically the poor mans version of the UD7 which is not as good as the Crosshair V Formula Z which is a poultry $250 relative to the $400 board selected to do the Intel benches. I really just don't get what the issue is about trying to find every bottleneck in a AMD setup to try prove a point.

No sane person I know will buy a G860 or i3 3220 slap it on a UD7 with GTX680 so its scewered as you are almost getting perfect conditions while all the AMD FX and Phenom's are being bottlenecked on the UD5 itself even if a frame or few. Motherboard bottlenecks are very real.

I would like to see a APU vs i3/Pentium on a budget build off that is A85 vs B75 discrete and integrated performance.

 

[nate1492]

[citation][nom]hero1[/nom]Nice observation. I was wondering the same thing. It's time you provide conclusion based upon what you intended to test and not otherwise. You could state the FPS part after the fact.[/citation]

Latency tests being low and about the same, with 'winners' swapping wasn't what this roundup was about. It was about best value. Plus, latency tests that talk about percentiles are only there to find outliers, if the latencies are low, they have basically zero impact on the performance. Stop letting your bias cloud your reading. AMD was bested in almost every aspect, they are not the better chip right now at the higher pricepoints with a dedicated GPU. Simple.

 

[shikamaru31789]

[citation][nom]rdlazar[/nom]Where would the Athlon II x4 750K be on that list?[/citation]
I'm no expert but I'd think it would perform a little better than an A10. I'd think that having the integrated GPU disabled would give the CPU a bit more oomph. But then the core clock is a bit slower than the A10, so who knows. If AMD does ever release it, it'd need to be at a fairly low price point to be a better buy than the Phenom II X4 965 at $95. I still think the Phenom II would be a better buy regardless, because you can get an AM3+ mobo and a Phenom II now, and upgrade to an 8350 later once games are optimized for 6-8 cores (which might be sooner rather than later if these rumors about the NextBox and PS4 using 8 core AMD CPU's are true).

 

[Guest]

I finally Found it.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1567108/intel-compiler-cripples-code-amd-via-chips

This is something that was covered up for a long time. it is strange that now the Phenom that were so crap against Core2, are now as good as the i3. Looks like Intel have been buying into bad practice. I long suspected this, and it took me a while to find this article.
Would you still support intel if you were to suddenly realise that they were better than AMD only becasue they paid other companies to cripple their completition.

This is still enacted today, and many that use x86 compilers (even hardcore coders) have not realised that they have been doing this since AMD took the crown in 2003.

 

[mayankleoboy1]

[citation][nom]ginister[/nom]I finally Found it. http://www.theinquirer.net/inquire [...] -via-chipsThis is something that was covered up for a long time. it is strange that now the Phenom that were so crap against Core2, are now as good as the i3. Looks like Intel have been buying into bad practice. I long suspected this, and it took me a while to find this article. Would you still support intel if you were to suddenly realise that they were better than AMD only becasue they paid other companies to cripple their completition. This is still enacted today, and many that use x86 compilers (even hardcore coders) have not realised that they have been doing this since AMD took the crown in 2003.[/citation]

downvoted you.

FACT : 99.9% of Windows SOFTWARE DEVS (not just game devs) use MS Visual Studio, which has its own proprietery, vendor neutral compiler. So all games perform according to the raw power of the processor itself.

FACT : Intel compiler produces faster code for AMD processors, compared to AMD's own compiler.

FACT : AMD does not have a compiler that produces windows exe code. It produces linux-only code.

 

[hmp_goose]

I got'a ask: Why talk about frame times? Wouldn't have reporting the low frame rates at one and two standard deviations have done the same thing?

 

[The_Trutherizer]

This will be the last tomshardware article I read if they don't come with a plausible explanation of why there is such a bias in favour of Intel with regards to the motherboard quality used in these benchmarks. I mean really $400 top of the crop Z77 vs midrange 990x board. By the same manufacturer! So obvious. I am a bit disappointed really...

 

[The_Trutherizer]

Even misquoting previous articles!

 

[de5_Roy]

this article was honestly worth the wait. new measurement tool, new cpus, new price points (for amd cpus ), - very nice. had fun reading it.

i see some people (okay it's mostly sarinaide) nitpicking over mobo choice. they bench the cpus (for gaming) only and try to remove other limitations. that's why, while the cpus are under $200 margin, the rest of the bench is full of high end parts. again, this is done to remove non-cpu limitations, it's not a budget consideration.

this article paint the best picture for amd cpus (for gaming) in a long time. yet some people are stupidly claiming bias. may be there's just no winning with fanboys.

 

[mayankleoboy1]

[citation][nom]sarinaide[/nom]The Z77X UD7 is a $400 Z77 chipset board with fantastic PCI-e and DDR interface almost worth 3-5FPS alone over say the UD5H version of the same motherboard. [/citation]

What the hell is a "fantastic" PCIE and DDR interface ? These arent like the USB controllers, that cheaper ones are slower.
Also 3-5 FPS ? Really, this much ? I would be surprised if the difference is more than 0.5 FPS, but that is the error margin itself.

 

[The_Trutherizer]

[citation][nom]mayankleoboy1[/nom]downvoted you.FACT : 99.9% of Windows SOFTWARE DEVS (not just game devs) use MS Visual Studio, which has its own proprietery, vendor neutral compiler. So all games perform according to the raw power of the processor itself.FACT : Intel compiler produces faster code for AMD processors, compared to AMD's own compiler.FACT : AMD does not have a compiler that produces windows exe code. It produces linux-only code.[/citation]

Well the Intel compiler is basically the most advanced compiler available out there. I hardly think it is comparable to Open64 which yes is used for Linux and academic purposes. In all fairness Intel does not have to provide advanced support for any other CPU if it does not want to, but it's not cool. Not cool at all. Intel has had a long dreary history of being anti-competitive. It would be nice if they felt their hardware can stand 100% on it's own merits. I mean the information is freely available.

"Intel® compilers, associated libraries and associated development tools may or may not optimize to the same degree for non-Intel microprocessors for optimizations that are not unique to Intel microprocessors. These optimizations include Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (Intel® SSE2), Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (Intel® SSE3), and Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (Intel® SSSE3) instruction sets and other optimizations."

That's the statement the courts forced Intel to issue. Please note the wording "for optimizations that are not unique to Intel microprocessors". That basically means that even if they could provide optimisation since it is the same features we are talking about, they don't. We're talking SSE2, SSE3 and SSSE3 here... Basically the whole of recent CPU history.

 

[sarinaide]

Well it seems you pointed out that everywhere else they used high end included the Z77 board but basically mid range AMD motherboards, good job. The difference between a Z77 UD3 and a UD7 is in itself worth 5FPS probably even more due to the integration on the motherboard.

de5_Roy would it really have been that hard to have actually used the highest end AMD boards? instead of $100 and $150 mid range boards?

On the benches themselves its really only Skyrim and starcraft which give any gap between the respective companies higher priced parts, hell in one of them it was quite funny that a a10 had the lowest latencies and how regularly the G860 played tail gunner good choice on the G860 where TechReport used the replacement G2120 which just hopelessly flopped. The moral ultimately here when talking of 1-2 frames and maybe like 0.05ns is in question then maybe its rather irrelevent.

 

[abbadon_34]

It would be interesting to see if the same conclusions hold up for a mid-range GPU, or an AMD GPU.

 

[sarinaide]

[citation][nom]mayankleoboy1[/nom]What the hell is a "fantastic" PCIE and DDR interface ? These arent like the USB controllers, that cheaper ones are slower.Also 3-5 FPS ? Really, this much ? I would be surprised if the difference is more than 0.5 FPS, but that is the error margin itself.[/citation]

Oh I am sorry all motherboards perform exactly the same, who know why we spend $500 on a Rampage when a H61 cheap trick will perform exactly the same. #rolleyes#

 

[Guest]

Nice to see that my prety old PhII 955BE@3.6 GHz is still more then enough for gaming.

 

[thegreatsquare]

[citation][nom]The_Trutherizer[/nom]Well the Intel compiler is basically the most advanced compiler available out there. I hardly think it is comparable to Open64 which yes is used for Linux and academic purposes. In all fairness Intel does not have to provide advanced support for any other CPU if it does not want to, but it's not cool. Not cool at all. Intel has had a long dreary history of being anti-competitive. It would be nice if they felt their hardware can stand 100% on it's own merits. I mean the information is freely available."Intel® compilers, associated libraries and associated development tools may or may not optimize to the same degree for non-Intel microprocessors for optimizations that are not unique to Intel microprocessors. These optimizations include Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (Intel® SSE2), Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (Intel® SSE3), and Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (Intel® SSSE3) instruction sets and other optimizations."That's the statement the courts forced Intel to issue. Please note the wording "for optimizations that are not unique to Intel microprocessors". That basically means that even if they could provide optimisation since it is the same features we are talking about, they don't. We're talking SSE2, SSE3 and SSSE3 here... Basically the whole of recent CPU history.[/citation]

Should Nvidia optimize AMD drivers as well?

Also, ould adding one Q9650 to the test lineup be so hard?

 

[The_Trutherizer]

[citation][nom]thegreatsquare[/nom]Should Nvidia optimize AMD drivers as well?Also, ould adding one Q9650 to the test lineup be so hard?[/citation]

We're talking about the same features here.

 

[Guest]

most games only use 2 cores max. so you can't talk about multicore performance based on gaming tests (especially when there are 8 cores in a unit)

 

[ojas]

[citation][nom]The_Trutherizer[/nom]Well the Intel compiler is basically the most advanced compiler available out there. I hardly think it is comparable to Open64 which yes is used for Linux and academic purposes. In all fairness Intel does not have to provide advanced support for any other CPU if it does not want to, but it's not cool. Not cool at all. Intel has had a long dreary history of being anti-competitive. It would be nice if they felt their hardware can stand 100% on it's own merits. I mean the information is freely available."Intel® compilers, associated libraries and associated development tools may or may not optimize to the same degree for non-Intel microprocessors for optimizations that are not unique to Intel microprocessors. These optimizations include Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (Intel® SSE2), Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (Intel® SSE3), and Supplemental Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (Intel® SSSE3) instruction sets and other optimizations."That's the statement the courts forced Intel to issue. Please note the wording "for optimizations that are not unique to Intel microprocessors". That basically means that even if they could provide optimisation since it is the same features we are talking about, they don't. We're talking SSE2, SSE3 and SSSE3 here... Basically the whole of recent CPU history.[/citation]
Intel is a company, not a charity. Asking them to produce AMD-optimized or VIA optimized compilers as well is as dumb as asking MS to give people a "Choose your browser!" screen when they install windows.

It's not about being anti-competitive. In fact, they ARE being competitive. They're saying, well, here's our product, and here's our compiler that gets you the best out of our product. What's wrong with that?

Why not ask ARM for a x86 compiler so that ARM-based code can be translated easily to x86, so that it'll be easier to port Android apps to Intel/AMD SoCs?

Or Apple to officially support Wine? Like, in-built Wine. Or a Windows PC with Linux pre-installed?

And BTW you can download the Intel compiler for Linux for free if you're using it for personal/academic use.

 

[de5_Roy]

Well it seems you pointed out that everywhere else they used high end included the Z77 board but basically mid range AMD motherboards, good job. The difference between a Z77 UD3 and a UD7 is in itself worth 5FPS probably even more due to the integration on the motherboard.

de5_Roy would it really have been that hard to have actually used the highest end AMD boards? instead of $100 and $150 mid range boards?

sigh... 'everywhere else'?
only 'mistake' they did was link z77 up5 while they used up7 and same thing with 990fx(ud7/ud5) mobos. from the specs it looks like ud5 is anything but a mid-range board(despite the price).
do you think that they buy the latest high end gear every time they do a review or do they request vendors to participate by sending their available stuff?

On the benches themselves its really only Skyrim and starcraft which give any gap between the respective companies higher priced parts, hell in one of them it was quite funny that a a10 had the lowest latencies and how regularly the G860 played tail gunner good choice on the G860 where TechReport used the replacement G2120 which just hopelessly flopped. The moral ultimately here when talking of 1-2 frames and maybe like 0.05ns is in question then maybe its rather irrelevent.

i didn't quite understand these bits, but it looks like you just contradicted yourself in the same post.
tbh, i don't think that The Highest End amd mobo woulda made any difference if the fps diff. was within margin of error.

 

[ojas]

[citation][nom]thegreatsquare[/nom]Should Nvidia optimize AMD drivers as well?Also, ould adding one Q9650 to the test lineup be so hard?[/citation]
+1 to both points.

I have a Q8400, i know it performs about the same as the A8-3570K, but i was interested in the latencies, since the memory controller isn't integrated.

 

[The_Trutherizer]

[citation][nom]de5_Roy[/nom]sigh... 'everywhere else'? only 'mistake' they did was link z77 up5 while they used up7 and same thing with 990fx(ud7/ud5) mobos. from the specs it looks like ud5 is anything but a mid-range board(despite the price). do you think that they buy the latest high end gear every time they do a review or do they request vendors to participate by sending their available stuff?i didn't quite understand these bits, but it looks like you just contradicted yourself in the same post.tbh, i don't think that The Highest End amd mobo woulda made any difference if the fps diff. was within margin of error.[/citation]

A company with a cross licensing agreement with AMD and who uses and optimises for AMD's 64bit instructions quite enthusiastically...

 

[The_Trutherizer]

Sorry the above was meant to quote @ojas' comment regarding intel being "a company not a charity"