The 8 core showdown and analysis thread.

[Mal X]

that's me s***** up, my old PSU blew this morning, I connected up the new Kingston SSD and the Western Digital to the PSU, i had to use an additional power cable from my new BE-Quiet to connect to my existing OCZ 650...

the rig started up and switched off instantly...the wall plug is ok but the PSU is dead, i was trying to back up my games.

i dont think the PSU liked 3 hard drives on two separate power cables, but that PSU seemed quite strong

finally, i'm not happy about copying any of my dodgy files over .....AT ALL...........but if so Wow, my old rig will take a lot of time to download everything, it'll have to stay switched on over night....especially all those Steam games

right here we go, more money about to be wasted

 

[ALXAndy]

if you want this bench/test to be excepted go do them both at same clock 2ghz compare the benchies you already done at this speed.

that is all.

So I should spend the best part of three days to say "Hey look, this is exactly what I expected"

Yeah man, you'll have to forgive me for like, not bothering.

What I showed was how much of a rip off Intel's Xeons are, and that AMD CPUs are far better than the Intel-ites seem to think they are.

I expected a reaction to that of course, and a fair amount of the defensive and aggressive posts saying "wah wah wah, not fair !!!"

Only it was fair. Blame Intel. Maybe if more people did that rather than using AMD as their sole excuse for everything things would be better off.

But noooo ! mustn't tarnish the big blue god.

Edit. Oh sorry, I thought you said expected, what you meant was accepted.

Which is even worse. Why should I deliberately derp a CPU just so the blue boys can give themselves a polish?

hahaha ! sorry man, will never be biased.

 

[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.

 

[Martini1991]

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.

 

[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.

 

[Martini1991]

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.

 

[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.

 

[gpuerrilla]

2012, but you are right about almost two years old, mine was one of the first off the van. The price remained remarkably stable for a long time.

Bulldozer was 2011.

 

[John24]

Sorry it's been removed now. The rig is now in the hands of my lady, hence why I made the decision to stick with the Intel. Far less aggro to run a stock standard CPU that makes the rig quieter.

Shame, thanks anyway.

 

[Desperado126]

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?

 

[Martini1991]

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

The OC potential part makes no sense, the OC potential of the FX8350 wasn't all that, lower than the i5 3570K.

The FX8320 has the best OC potential of the lot as far as modern CPU's go.

It's the FX8320 that really got people talking, rather than the FX8350.

 

[joeyjojo]

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?

It gave 15-20% better FPS in BF4 a while back. Just one example.

 

[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

 

[Martini1991]

They're bringing a proper first party start menu back to 8.1. It was alluded that it was in the 8.1 update 1, but it wasn't.

 

[Tattysnuc]

interesting article - well done and thanks for taking the time to test and document all this!

 

[ubersonic]

Thanks for doing this Andy it's very cool, sorry about all the guys bashing you because they didn't bother to read lol.

if you want this bench/test to be excepted go do them both at same clock 2ghz compare the benchies you already done at this speed.

What would be the point in that? the FX-8 would be destroyed, its a 4 module 8 thread chip, the Xeon is a 8 core 16 thread chip with higher IPC, if they were both clocked the same the Xeon would walk it.

 

[gpuerrilla]

Lack of intelligence is all that springs to mind ubersonic, some characters on here just enjoy spamming mindless garbage as long as it conforms to the popular bandwagon of spouting factoids.

 

[Martini1991]

What would be the point in that? the FX-8 would be destroyed, its a 4 module 8 thread chip, the Xeon is a 8 core 16 thread chip with higher IPC, if they were both clocked the same the Xeon would walk it.

I don't know why people say " 4 module " like it means anything, because it really doesn't. The application doesn't give a rats arse.
Again, I reiterate, I disagree with the "2 GHZ FX" calls, they're pointless.

 

[~>Dg<~]

Lack of intelligence is all that springs to mind ubersonic, some characters on here just enjoy spamming mindless garbage as long as it conforms to the popular bandwagon of spouting factoids.

read your own statement its as bad as any.

 

[joeyjojo]

I don't know why people say " 4 module " like it means anything, because it really doesn't. The application doesn't give a rats arse.

It makes a huge difference in purely integer based or floating point based workloads.

http://www.hardcoreware.net/amd-piledriver-fx-review-vishera-8350/2/

Floating point Piledriver looks like a quad core (close to Intel i5) because of the shared FPU, but integer it looks like an ~ 7 core (compared to the i5), not too far from the theoretical speedup of 2x.

This doesn't translate to real-world applications very often though.