The 8 core showdown and analysis thread.

[ALXAndy]

Core usage without figures doesn't actually show anything though.
If the performance is worse, then more cores aren't better.

Eh?

Unless the software is putting dummy loads on the CPU then of course it shows something.

Metro Last Light performed better on the Intel, even with the crap clock speed. Better than a 4.9ghz AMD. Tomb Raider also performed better, and both games are known to quite like AMD.

Look at the Crysis 2 result. There we see a poorly threaded game threading, well, poorly. The performance was also a bit naff. I deliberately ran a game that did not thread well to show that games that do not thread well, well, do not thread well and that there's nothing going on with the OS spreading the loads around making the results look good.

My issue is that by now Crysis 2 is an awfully old game. Thus, you wouldn't say "Hey, just think I'll moochy on down to OCUK and buy a load of parts to build a rig to play Crysis 2 on !"

When people buy PCs they usually do it to upgrade so that they can play new games, not old ones. And the new ones all like to have cores and thread well.

Which is what I've been saying for the best part of a year, and have now proven it.

Core support has been expected for ages, simply because of the new consoles and how PC games are all sloppy seconds to the console payday. Sheesh, even my dead nan would know that.

 

[ALXAndy]

I mean it doesn't show anything in the context that it doesn't show whether the threading nullifies the slow clock speeds.

Which is why you'd need an i7 3770K at 4GHZ against the Xeon at 2GHZ. As they should going 100% be almost equal.

If the 3770K gets consistently better results, then we're certainly not at a stage yet where we can sacrifice core speed for cores.

I expect you'll tell me I'm wrong.

I don't agree with all this "Underclock the FX83" lark either.

With Metro apparently clock speed matters pretty much nothing. It's cores it wants. Even when they reduced the clock speeds by as much as 44% the performance only dropped 14%.

I do see where you're coming from, but tbh? if a game runs well it runs well. All I would achieve by running a 3770k at 4ghz is to show that a high clock could possibly make up for a lack of cores. What would be a better thing to do would be to run a 3770k at 2ghz, then see just how much adding on cores adds to performance (or not, as the case may be).

And I can do that with the Xeon, simply by disabling cores. Now obviously there's still a lot of headroom in the Xeon. Very few of those apps that thread actually push the core usage higher than 50% for more than a few seconds. Obviously Hitman does it best. Absolutely stuffs the cores with plenty to do.

Give it a few days and I'll hunker down and knock out some benchmarks to see what, if any, difference those cores make.

 

[ALXAndy]

Running a 3770K at 2GHZ doesn't show anything of actual substance (Which is also true of why I think it's a joke people are calling for a 2GHZ FX8), nor would mimicking it.
And Techspot have the FX83 at parity with the i5 3470 (They're both at stock) on Metro.

I wouldn't bother with that, it's only playing into the conclusion that you want to exist.

If a 3770K at 4GHZ is faster than the Xeon, in the games you say can use 16 threads, then the "More cores is better" becomes a fallacy.

I don't know either way, but I'd be surprised if the Xeon and 3770K produced equal results in any of the games you've listed.

I didn't start this thread to show what a 3770K at 4ghz can do against this Xeon. TBH? you can work that out easily enough using the benchmarks from the Xeon. IE - run a 3770k in a straight line against the Xeon.

The tests I used are all either very highly threaded, or, don't use hardly any threads, so there's more than enough information there should any one want to compare their <Insert CPU type here>

As you said before the tests even started, you already had a rough idea. So did I, so that made two of us.

But you seem to be missing the point. People say that games do not use any more than 4 cores. I'm totally disregarding what those cores may do for performance because I don't agree with you that more cores could hurt performance in any way unless the OS had an issue like Windows 7 did with core parking on more than 4 cores.

I've shown what a 8c 16t CPU does when ran with properly threaded modern games. That was all I set out to do. People accuse me of bashing Intel yet here I am basically saying that a 8 core 16t unlocked Haswell E
CPU for the best part of a grand may actually work with gaming but hey, I'm am AMD troll.

Of course it won't be worth it. No CPU is ever worth £1000. Not when there are so many other countless CPUs out there that can do the same sort of job for a tenth of the money. But hey, at least now the Intel boys can give themselves that excuse any way.

The information is easily misconstrued either way. I'm saying hey, games use more than four cores now you know? and then I could be taken to be endorsing this ridiculous CPU Intel are about to release. Or, I could be taken as saying that hey, a £100 AMD is more than good enough for gaming.

The bottom line is I've proved my point. Games do not only want 4 cores. How well they make use of more? how much performance it gives you? yada ya ya ya yada ya.. All irrelevant. The core statistics totally disagree.

 

[ALXAndy]

this was very interesting post thanks for sharing it it's really funny how intel fan boys tend to put down AMD cpu's i remember when i got FX8350 everyone was laughing at me but when people started seeing the OC potential of it and the price it came at everyone started talking about it and I have say that amd aren't that bad at gaming they are pretty good personally the only main reason why i tend to buy AMD cpu's is cause of the price tag i just dont have that amount of cash to go and buy a good cpu and intel compatible motherboard amd tends to be cheaper but not necessarily worse in performance it all really comes down to what is more important to you IMO. i was just wondering I've stayed away from windows 8 since am a bit scared of the layout etc but is it really better then windows 7?

Here's a very quick tutorial.

Install Windows 8. Then install this.

http://www.iobit.com/iobitstartmenu8.php

That will immediately make it look and work very similar to 7.

Then, all you need to do is turn off UAC, open a jpg with something within the desktop (set it to always open with) then the same for a MP3 and you pretty much have Windows 7.

The only other thing you need to know about 8 is how to disable forced driver signing for things like cheap usb dongles and what not, but you can just google for how to do that

 

[ALXAndy]

Exactly. Lets not put AMD up to be any different here. They are different and price accordingly as the HAVE to be. Its the only way they can obtain any market. If in some make believe world they did make a CPU that could compete then it would be shocker of a price for sure.

Only it's not true because the Athlon XP absolutely battered anything Intel could muster up yet AMD kept the costs down. So sadly they've already been given the chance yet still didn't extract the urine.

Then let's look at their graphics cards. Radeon 295X2 is £1044.99

Titan Z is £1999, the 295x2 is faster.

So AMD have had plenty of chances to go mad with prices but have failed to do so.

So I'm not having that. That's just more excuses from camp blue to justify the massive price premiums they charge for their products. And they've always been like that, given the chance or not. Even the P4s that were massively underpowered were still stupid prices.

Some people will just pay anything to go to the blue team, even if they're slower.

Edit. AMD will never be deemed good enough to charge those sorts of prices. They did in the past, they ended up losing money. People see AMD as a dirty brand and thus, even when their products are better people just won't pay the high prices. Only Intel and Nvidia get away with that, and they do it by brainwashing and spending millions on salesmen to go around making their products sound like the sun shines out of their ass.

Even in this day and age, where people have the internet at their disposal and full and complete means to use an AMD CPU and see what it actually does there are still a million blue mound hounds running around completely misinformed. And this is down to Intel's marketing strategy and how they court people.

 

[ALXAndy]

I remember the original FX lineup costing a fair whack...

And AMD took a loss on every one sold.

...only you're an AMD fanboy who can't see the wood from the trees...

Titan Z is only a smiggin slower ** FOR GAMES **. Computationally it's better especially for CUDA assisted...

Athlon xp? can you not quote anything that isn't 13 years old

that's the problem with fanboys can't get passed the fact that thy're has beens and were unable to adapt and have lost

It could have been a hundred years ago, dimmy, the point still stands. AMD had a CPU that beat Intel yet didn't charge the earth for it. AMD have had numerous GPUs that have beaten the Nvidias yet, didn't charge the earth for those either.

Titan Z is slower, end of. Computational pah, Nvidia say it's a gaming card, same as the Titan Black. It costs double what the AMD does, yet still you can't do the maths. Not surprising really.

AMD fanboy. Yup, that's me. Intel 3970x @ 4.8ghz, Intel Xeon 8 core, Intel Westmere hex, AMD Athlon Kabini.

Totally an AMD fanboy yes.

 

[ALXAndy]

AMD are seen as a dirty brand because of peoples' personal experiences with their products, just because there is a highly committed and vocal minority on internet forums who pretend that everything is hunky dory with their products doesn't change the reality of what people experience first hand when they buy into AMD.

NVidia and Intel charge premiums because people have experienced their products first hand and deem what they offer to be worthy of a premium, if AMD tried to match them they would be simply pricing themselves out of the market.

As things stand on the processor front you can buy an Intel quad core which has consistently fast performance all across the board and modern motherboards, or an 8 'mini core' AMD FX which can vary from a match for Intel's quad core to laughably slow depending on application and has motherboards which haven't been updated technology-wise since March 2010 (990FX is a rebadged 890FX). Then there are all of the other factors, heat, power draw, necessary cooling which is in Intel's favour.

Intel simply offer more elegant products, as do NVidia in the GPU market. AMD offer value and that's about it.

pmsl what a conceited load of old codswallop.

Don't forget to smell your own farts now.

 

[ALXAndy]

Why not benchmark a AMD 6 core vs an Intel 6 core both at say 4.5ghz ?, that would make sense for a like for like comparison.

But it isn't a like for like comparison because as we know, the AMD suffers due to IPC and single threaded performance.

That's the sort of crap people want to see. Then they can go "Oh look ! Intel win again, wow etc"

But it isn't that clearly cut I'm afraid. When you actually sit down and take a look at the figures sure, the Intel wins. But it's not all about what product costs the most money.

People say that Piledriver is a failure. If that's the case then given that it's an extension product of Bulldozer why are AMD still making it and why, if no one buys them, are they still selling it?

Surely they would have gone bankrupt years ago (right at the launch of Bulldozer) if that was the case yes?

No instead of that they are binning chips and packing them with AIOs that supposedly no one buys. If their marketing staff really were the blind gibbons people say they are they would be no more.

The elite few that want the absolute best and will pay the massively, disgustingly over inflated price for it are the minority. They are the 1% of the 1% and no company exists purely to pander to their needs. Trust me on that, business does not work that way.

I bet there are more people reading this thread with an AMD CPU (and not posting) than there are the type who come here to rubbish AMD.

 

[ALXAndy]

I think AMD probably sell quite a few of them.

The sort of people who say "only Intel regardless of cost" are very much in the minority and overwhelmingly are they ones who post on enthusiast forums.

Some just know what a CPU is, know they need one of sorts and then buy any old CPU that fits their price range.

Others will read around forums and see "AMD this and that.... only buy Intel"

Some of those will then do that while others will look at Intel's prices, gulp, get a Games Console and unknowingly end up with AMD anyway!

Of course they're selling. AMD would not manufacture a product that makes them a loss (they've done that before it nets you nothing as a business). They're wildly popular out in the USA..

Let's use Corsair as an example. What they been doing lately? coming up with tons of cheap products so they can afford to stay in business. Companies like OCZ who only made two or three products (ssd, psu and memory) have gone under. Why? because they're not catering to the masses with horrifically expensive PCIE SSDs.

Asus still very much embrace AMD AM3. They still come up with a new board from time to time, they still hold the crown for AM3 products. They would not do so if they weren't making money.

It's the boring stuff that actually makes the money tbh.

 

[ALXAndy]

the thing about this is Intel are not that expensive. Xeon is expensive but really the product range of desktop processors are not that extreme.

You can get decent and better intel based pc's at all ranges of cost depending on each persons builds. It can be cheaper, it can be the same, a little more or more expensive...

You could spend a lot on things you don't actually need and say "there see intel is expensive".

Most of what i've seen is the over spending on these things that they don't need to make the pc work. best example is motherboards, the difference between the "low" end and "high" end motherboards is simply features and a lot of the features no one actually uses... why spend on full atx equipment and a 2billion watt psu when you only have 2 sticks of ram 1 gfx and an efficient processor...

They are expensive. Even when they were losing badly to the Athlon XP they still remained expensive. People bought Intel because they saw AMD as a dirty brand.

Going on your posts I would say that Intel should have gone out of business due to Netburst and RDRam. But they didn't.

The difference between a high end and crap motherboard is usually the power phases. Which are terribly important if you are into safe overclocking. They're not worth the money usually, much like any high end boutique product.

I read an article just after Sandy launched (Sandy was only reasonable because they did not know how Bulldozer was going to be) and it said that Intel had been getting into these 3D transistors which could be stacked upon each other. Note, using this method it would be far cheaper to produce CPUs because they are smaller, require less silicon ETC.

Sandy I5 = £160 or so.
Ivy I5 = £160 or so.
Haswell I5 = £160 or so
DC = £160 or so.

Even though they shrank the dies and then cheaped out on actually manufacturing them (poor TIM etc) they remained at the same price.

They released DC and people go "Ooo look, Devil's Canyon !". What they fail to see of course is that DC is actually Haswell that's been made better than it was because it was a poor product. If it wasn't Intel would not have replaced it.

What made me laugh the most was when Nvidia released Fermi. It was absolute total fail, yet people were still trying to see good parts of it. Nvidia were so close to going out of business that they actually started blocking out their partners and selling their own boxed branded GPUs.

Thankfully for them the GPU in question was the GTX 460 which was actually quite epic. A lesson to Nvidia - stop making big fat inefficient dies. They survived it, got fluke with Kepler (smaller cheaper and clocks higher, what they should have been doing before) and people go "oooo kepler !".

A GPU core that has 150mhz or so in it for overclocking headroom with terrible VRMs yet to people like you they can't do no wrong.

I remember the GTX 590. Overclock it and it simply blew up. Great product

 

[ALXAndy]

Ugh, don't drag me into this FFS.

I run about 8 hard drives, numerous accessories (video screens in the front of the rig) and god knows what else. I didn't choose the RM, some one gave it to me when I was severely down on my luck.

I always use power supplies that are massive overkill FWIW. Skimping just means your PSU runs hotter, and, wastes power in the heat dissipation. Sure they're better and more efficient than ever but I'd rather not chance it.