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From AMD8320 - i7 6700. Impressions

regulus

regulus

regulus

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Despite being vocal on occasion that the 8320 is still fine for cutting edge gaming, a great deal for an i7 6700(non K) fell into my lap. When the buying and selling were done, I was out of pocket about £90 for the entire upgrade of CPU/MOBO/DDR4. So not too bad really.

Playing AC: Unity on my widescreen at near enough max settings on a 1080gtx and the frames were ... well, not 60FPS. So I'd hope the i7 would help somewhat.

No difference. Although RAM usage came down a little bit.

Threw on Witcher 3. Max settings again. Think I was a few frames up on occasion but essentially, no difference.

Lastly I tried Farcry Primal. Max settings, no difference over the 8320 system.

Take into account that while I can't overclock the i7, I also never really overclocked the 8320 and played at stock MHZ for nearly the entire time I owned it. Guess I'm not much of an overclocker :p

I'll give GTAV a whirl later today but I can kinda guess what to expect ...

Will try some more games later and hopefully see some sort of upward trend across the range.

Either way, glad I went for the upgrade as I was always going to wonder. Piddly amount of money was spent buying 2nd hand gear (all less than 6 months old) so not begrudging it.

Maybe I'm missing a clever setting or button somewhere that'll magically start pumping out some performance everyone is raving about, and I'll definitely look for it, but if you happen to be in exactly the same position that I was, don't expect miracles. Quite impressive that a 4 year old CPU was still holding its own.

One LOL-worthy comment. Was in my local PC store last week chatting to a guy who works there. Told him about going from a 8320 to an i7. Got the old 'man, get ready for some serious frames. You're looking at least 30-40fps extra over your AMD system'. He was also on about how 'we both know that your 1080GTX would be more than enough GPU power for the next 5 years but your AMD was holding you back'. Sounds like someone that easily gets caught up by hype.

Maybe next gen we'll start seeing some decent gains?
 
What graphics card are you using? Same one for both cpu's? You might find that the graphics card was the bottleneck and if you put a 980ti or 1080 or similar on it you gain massive fps

Matt
 
I went from a 8350 overclocked to 4.7ghz to a 6700k at 4.5ghz and i gained approx 40fps on X Plane 10 and also approx about the same in most of my other games that I play such as Far Cry Primal, GTA 5.

I think if you have, say a 970 or lower then AMD is the best bet, financially, but as you progress up the GPU ladder, thats when intel really shines.

Matt
 
For instance , what fps were you getting on your 8320/1080 at max settings? On mine i was getting approx 55fps and thats with a 980ti
 
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I was looking at benchmarks earlier for 1080p gaming on the latest Battlefront. An i7 will get you about 40 more fps than an i3. Given the i3 was good for 147fps I doubt many would notice the difference.
 
mediamatt said:
For instance , what fps were you getting on your 8320/1080 at max settings? On mine i was getting approx 55fps and thats with a 980ti
Click to expand...

I can post some screens when I get home as I especially took some for this purpose.

On AC: Unity. 1080 GTX, 3440x1440. Ultra Settings

8320: Around 30-40 FPS at any given time
i7: Honestly, see above. Was hovering around 37-38FPS with the odd spike to 59fps but very very rarely.

Witcher 3. 1080 GTX, 3440x1440. Ultra, Hairworks on.

8320: Low to mid 30s.
i7: Low to mid 30s

Those are the only two I've tested extensively. As said in my OP, I've also had a dabble in Far Cry Primal and FPS was the same, but didn't go to enough areas in the game to be certain. But initial thoughts are that there's no difference there either.
 
You game at 3440x1440? The onus is quite heavily on the GPU at that resolution.

And the titles you've mentioned are gameworks, performance can vary rather crazily.

The benefit of an Intel CPU is generally for consistency of frames, higher minimums, but that's going to level out as the load increases on the GPU (Which, considering you're basically saying you're playing at 30-40 FPS, it's not exactly great, 4 FPS gain is 10%, but it's not going to mean much)
 
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when I went from the 8350 to the i5 4690k I found my games a lot smoother and I did gain FPS on dirt 3.

I recently had an i7 4770k in my system to test it as my mate was having stability issues ( turns out his board is knackered ) and running benchmarks in games and running valley I never gained anything over my 4690k both were running at 4.4Ghz if anything I noticed the i7 ran cooler.
 
Martini1991 said:
You game at 3440x1440? The onus is quite heavily on the GPU at that resolution.

And the titles you've mentioned are gameworks, performance can vary rather crazily.

The benefit of an Intel CPU is generally for consistency of frames, higher minimums, but that's going to level out as the load increases on the GPU (Which, considering you're basically saying you're playing at 30-40 FPS, it's not exactly great, 4 FPS gain is 10%, but it's not going to mean much)
Click to expand...

Yea I thought as much. Whilst the FPS aren't great, it does feel somewhat smoother when using FastSync. Happy to admit that most if it is all my head, but it doesn't 'feel' like 30-40 fps.

I know that it's a brutal resolution for a single card which is what set this whole upgrade of GPU/CPU/Mobo/RAM thing in motion.

Doom on the other hand is butter smooth at 60 FPS. Even on my old 980GTX/8320 combo @ 3440x1440.

Oh well. Next year I might sniff out a cheap 1080Ti and with an upgrade to a G'Sync monitor looming at some point, it should be ok.
 
Just been running some Heaven benchmarks.

Went from 97 FPS to nearly 119 FPS. Clocked the card harder this time but it wouldn't have been a 20% increase on FPS doing just that.

The CPU clearly is better in that case.

Guess just not seeing it in games yet
 
regulus said:
Just been running some Heaven benchmarks.

Went from 97 FPS to nearly 119 FPS. Clocked the card harder this time but it wouldn't have been a 20% increase on FPS doing just that.

The CPU clearly is better in that case.

Guess just not seeing it in games yet
Click to expand...

I think it depends on the game. some games like GTA V are more CPU dependent
 
Games have never been a useful benchmark for processors particularly when running max settings, the only way to benchmark processors using games is to run minimum (not maximum) settings and take GPU bottlenecks out of the equation.

If your argument is that AMD are sufficient for gaming then well that's true in most cases if you're running high enough settings to be bottlenecked by the graphics card but the fact still remains that Intel processors are way faster than AMD.
 
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