AMD Phenom II X4 955BE vs Core i7 920 HD4890 crossfire review!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It seems that the AMD Phenom IIX4 955BE is faster in 3 out of the 5 games which were tested:

http://www.modreactor.com/english/Re...re-i7-920.html

Considering that the X4 955 is currently around £147 delivered from Ebuyer this is a pretty decent result! Also as stated in the review a higher end DDR3 790FX motherboard costs around the same as the cheapest X58 motherboard too.

[greenpanda]

good to know
ive just opted for the 955be over the i7 920 on my first build.

[Terbinator]

Considering the differences are anemic and once you get past your desired frame rate does it really matter if one platform runs at 66 when the other runs at 69 i think id still go i7 for that "future-proofing" feeling. In addition to the beast that is i7, you mentioned yourself that X58 motherbaords can be picked up at thesame price as a 790FX now so from my point of view i7 still seems better value for money.

Just a minor thing but latenices for RAM were different between the 2 platforms, would of been nice to see them equal

[wellswells]

Thats an interesting read. I was very close to purchasing the 940 today, but perhaps the 955 with ddr3 would be worth the slightly larger investment.

I have a 100 different things i'm thinking about. I think I'll let SCANS today only offers decide for me Today's offers aren't really what I'm after alas.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The low end x58s are not that great with regards to overclocking whereas the 790FX is the best chipset AMD does, a good overclocker and is simply bettered featured TBH. Also you can get DDR2 versions of the 790FX with the SB750 southbridge for around £30 less. The peformance difference between DDR2 and DDR3 for a Phenom II is negligible in many cases anyway and DDR2 is still cheaper than DDR3.

[r3morse]

Sweet, I was planning to buy a similar phenom setup. Intel is just too expensive for their newer stuff.

[sammorris]

I've seen 4Ghz out of i7 920s on even relatively cheap (as cheap as i7 goes anyway) boards, and in any case, 3.8 is common. To match that the 955BE would need to be at least 4.5 if not nearing 5Ghz. That skews it a bit for the high-end enthusiast. The i7s aren't really focused gaming CPUs though, I think the Q9550 and Q9650 should be considered over them really, they're much cheaper, vastly more energy efficient, come with affordable motherboards, and are every bit as fast for a lot of games.
Even so, the result for the AMD in crossfire for Crysis Warhead is alarming. One wonders if the performance advantages in crossfire for the game in pretty much every drive release since the game came out are only really working for AMDs - it would explain why I haven't noticed any difference.

[Terbinator]

The i7s aren't really focused gaming CPUs though

Its more the case of games aren't i7 focused, hell we're only now starting to see games take advantage of quad's

[sammorris]

The main arguments of that report are when dual graphics are used, it's only then when there's an appreciable difference in any of the tests, and I can honestly say that quad cores have a substantial effect when you use dual graphics and have had for some time.

[TooNice]

I can honestly say that quad cores have a substantial effect when you use dual graphics and have had for some time.

I am not sure how you define substantial, but doubling the number of core (from 2 -> 4) while keeping the same clock speed yields about 5-10% in the games tested here on a 4870x2: http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=770&p=0 (at least for Core2 based chips).

Here's a more recent article with a 4870x2 in Crossfire setup (quad GPU). No dual core in the test, but they did test triple and quad AMD at the same frequency/setting. Again, an additional core provides some benefits, but doesn't look too substantial to me for most part.

I am not too convinced that graphics card are particularly optimised to make use of additional cores.

[sammorris]

Regardless of the benchmark results, my own personal experience was that for the most part, games do not see a noticeable difference from quads, but only because the CPU frame limit is already so high there's no need for anything more powerful. The games that were CPU limited, however, only really became apparent with dual graphics. My frame rates in Crysis for example went up very little when I moved from a 4870 to a 4870X2, and the fan speed (i.e. load) of the card was very low compared to other games, suggesting bad scaling, which in Crysis isn't all that surprising. Adding a quad core to the system, the performance and fan speed leapt. Adding a faster quad core later (I started with a Q6600 before moving to my current 9550) helped again to a reasonably significant extent.