SO EXCITED, upgraded CPU, any ideas on FPS gains?

So... one benchmark is the end-all, be-all of CPU performance?

Let's try that again. In games much more CPU-hungry than GPU-hungry. And let's use a resolution most people will be gaming at - 1920x1080, as opposed to 1680x1050. And just to make sure you don't accuse me of cherry-picking, let's use the exact same review.







So what can we conclude? Battlefield 3 is GPU-constrained and the CPUs don't budge much; there's a difference of maybe 2 FPS on ALL of the CPUs they test, even some pretty old Phenom IIs, and that's basically negligible. But the other two games? The framerates at Ultra on an Intel is what the AMD will do only on High, and in the case of stuff like Skyrim, it's pretty much no contest. We're talking nearly a 33% better framerate on either quality.

And guess what PS2 taxes? Both CPU *AND* GPU!

I'm hardly an intel fanboy - I'm a "bang for buck" fanboy. I've had AMD systems before back in the early 2000s when they outdid the Pentium 4. He got a mobo plus the CPU for $189; that's not bad, and considering what he had, even I would've said it was an upgrade, but the simple fact is that CPU is definitely more constrained than an Intel one, so it's not something he should expect to last him years and years.

He'll get a boost, but not a huge one, and I'm trying to set realistic expectations for him. You've also got a considerably better GPU than he does, which is why you get more performance until you hit the CPU bottleneck (framerates, by the way, are useless without knowing your screen resolution and other graphics settings as well, unless you use only the pure presets the game has.) Then again, a similar upgrade to an Intel system would've probably run him about $400 assuming he got an i5-4670K for about $250 and a decent motherboard for about $150. It also still doesn't solve his GPU being a mid-high one.

Put short and simple, AMD is the cheaper option, but its cheapness is lost because you'll need to upgrade their CPUs after a couple of years, and with AMD focusing less on desktop performance and more on mobile/embedded performance, the writing is on the wall. So let's not accuse someone who knows what the hell they're talking about, and measures processors by their actual performance as opposed to their branding as being an Intel fanboy, okay?

Well, you still have to remember there are still people who can't afford to drop $400-$500 on an intel CPU/Mobo. I'd say there are at least two types of people in the PC gaming scene. Those who just enjoy it for what it is, and are fortunate enough to be able to build their own systems to play such massive, high-end graphical games without digging too deep into their pockets, and those who drop a boatload of cash to get the most beauty and the advantage over idiots who try to play PS2 on a laptop. And, I guess i'm speaking from the first perspective. Sorry for any misunderstandings, you know what you are talking about, I just thought you came off a little aggressive in that first post.

P.S.: That statement about having to update CPUs after a couple of years... That's not really an issue anymore, unless developers pump out tons of games like Planetside 2 that are more CPU intensive.. But I don't really see that happening unless everyone switches over to the MMO scene.

Of course, and no offense taken. I get a bit incensed when someone accuses me of being a pure Intel fanboy, for what it's worth, but I've gravitated to bang-for-buck since when I bought an Athlon XP 3000+ in 2004. Of course, that was about $400 at the time, so to me, the fact a top-of-the-line Intel CPU is about $325 (not counting, of course, the -E series of Enthusiast chips, which is overkill for gaming) is basically a "This is a no-brainer, there's not much reason to buy anything else" sort of thing.

To me, CPUs are one of the four components you don't skimp on (and even then, it's not #1 - that'd be Power Supply), so I'll gravitate towards whatever gives me solid performance for the least money, and considering I've been building my own PCs for a decade, $325 doesn't seem like a ton of money to me, compared to back then such a CPU being $600. That said, the vast majority of gamers would be quite happy with a $225 i5-4670K, which is basically 80-90% of the i7-4770K for 2/3rds of the price (and thus my current recommendation of bang-for-buck unless people do movie encoding and the like, which would make gains from the i7's Hyperthreading), and only about $50 more than most of AMD's fastest offerings (unless you buy stuff like the FX-9750, which is a $400 CPU, and very silly to get compared to an i7-4770K due to its massive Instructions-Per-Cycle inefficiency, ridiculous 220W TDP that forces you to get watercooling, and the fact it costs $50-75 more), so that's why I wondered "Why did you take that FX?" until I remember he said it was both the FX and the Motherboard. That's a pretty good deal, all things considered, from what he had, though I'd still feel he would've been better served with another $100-150 for an Intel CPU/Mobo. Regardless, it's his money, as you pointed out he might not have had enough to do that, and if he's happy with what his upgrade, ultimately that's all that matters.

And yes, it's true you don't have to upgrade CPUs after a few years, but my point there was you get considerably more mileage out of an Intel CPU than an AMD one, though this may level off slightly as you mentioned. There's i7-920s that could still go strong and do a pretty good job today, about as good as most of AMD's recent CPUs.

The catch is that the i7-920 was released in November 2008 - and unless games begin to play to AMD's current strengths (using more than four CPU cores when most games use two "heavy" threads and two helper threads if on a quadcore, spreading the work in a balanced way across all threads versus "heavy/light" threads), AMD is not going to easily catch up short of a massively revolutionary microarchitecture - something that's likely falling to the wayside given their focus has changed from desktop to mobile/embedded processing performance.