 AMD finally has a high-end, a truly high-end platform. So this is the 990FX Crosshair V formula with an 1100T, 8 gigs of RAM, a 120 gig SSD. It's my usual test platform, except it has two GTX 590s on it. So this is pretty much the fastest gaming machine you can build on an AMD CPU. Well, 6990 would be pretty much equivalent. So it'd be an equivalent fastest gaming machine. So what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be looking at, once and for all, which is better for gaming, AMD or Intel CPUs, at least from this generation, which won't be relevant very soon with both those are coming out and Intel having a refresh coming. But whatever, OK, so we'll know for now. So I'm going to do the 1100T versus the Intel Core i5-2500K. Now the reason that I'm using these two particular chips is that they are fairly equivalently priced at this time. So there is no price to performance ratio argument to be made, really. I mean, the 2500K has to win by about 10% just to break even. So yeah, let's see how this goes. This is going to be mostly graphics bound in spite of the fact that I'm running quad SLI with 590s because I am going to be running fairly intensive games. I may add some more games to the test suite, but let's just see how things go and this will be interesting. I've wondered this for a long time. How do these two platforms compare against each other in a truly equivalent scenario? Oh yeah, for the Intel CPU, I will be using the Z68AGD80 as my motherboard of choice. So I've loaded on the Intel platform now. This is a Z68 platform, but I will not be using the onboard graphics at all. So I'm going to be disabling it because turning on Virtue actually will impact graphics performance somewhat while it will increase video encoding speed through supported programs. So I'm just going for pure graphics performance. We're assuming this is for a gaming system given that there are dual GTX 590s in it. So I finished my 1100T results and I will be following up now with my 2500K results. I wanted to give you guys a little bit of info first though. So for all of these, I'm running at 2560 by 1600 and I'm going with my usual settings. So that means for example, Witcher 2, I'm not using the very highest setting, I'm using high for example. Battlefield Bad Company 2, 4X anti-aliasing, 8x AF. Fear 3, I had to turn off AA even though normally I use it at 2560 by 1600. I was getting only about 12 FPS which is not enough for me to play through my run through with the 1100T. So I'm turning off anti-aliasing. That made a big difference to performance so we'll see how that goes. Crysis 2, I am using the... shoot I can't remember for the life of me. Oh yeah, the second highest, that's right. And then Dirt 3, I have it on ultra. So here we go, 2500K testing upcoming, quad SLI is working. Let's see how this goes. One other thing to mention actually, Mafia 2, I am using Apex physics on high, 8x AF and anti-aliasing is set to on. So I'm using Nvidia cards, might as well crank up the physics. Alright so I have my results with the 2500K. This is all using the same graphical settings. So in Dirt 3 we see a 12.5% increase in performance. So this is about what I would expect given the CPU costs about 10 to 12% more. Okay in Crysis 2 we see a 35.5% difference in performance. I mean 62.5 frames per second is substantially more playable than 46.8 just due to the fact that you're not gonna see those same dips. In Creature 2 we saw just a very insubstantial increase in performance so we're obviously not very CPU bound here. Fear 3, now this one's funny, I'm gonna go back, I'm gonna put the 1100T with the 990FX back on the test bench and I'm gonna run it again just to be sure. But I did run into some weirdness on the AMD platform with Fear 3 where when I was running anti-aliasing the performance was about a third of this, it was very very low. And just turning off AA brought us up to here. Whereas on the Intel platform with zero times anti-aliasing I didn't see any weirdness in terms of performance. Fear 3 is not a super demanding game so even at 2560x1600 I was expecting more like this number and that's what I got. So I'll rerun it just to see. Battlefield Bad Company 2 is about par for the course and then Mafia 2 maybe due to the processor intensive nature of it with all the particles and what not. The CPU still has to help out the GPU with that so we ended up seeing a 40, approximately 40% increase in gaming performance going to a 2500K from an 1100T with GTX 590s. So let's, you know what I'm actually gonna, since I have to go throw the other platform back on anyway, well maybe what I'll do is I'll run one more game here just cause it's not quite super super late yet so I can do a little bit more testing for you guys. So I'm thinking maybe I'll do Lost Planet 2. Yeah, let's do Lost Planet 2. So I made myself a smoothie and still at work here. So I ran Metro 2033 and Lost Planet 2 so Metro 2033 actually showed the 2500K losing, this is the first time I've seen that, and then Lost Planet 2 showed a 20% victory for the 2500K. Now, Fear 3, if I put that back on, Fear 3 has exhibited exactly the same behavior, second time around. So the 2500K, even with 4x anti-aliasing, still manages a better frame rate than Fear 3 on the 1100T without anti-aliasing. So thinking, I mean, SLI support's pretty new for AMD platforms so maybe there's an issue with the SLI driver. What I think I'm gonna do, well not I think I'm gonna do, what I'm gonna do right now is I'm gonna take a 68, oh 68, I don't even have a 68, well I do have a 6870 but I don't have it on me. So 6970, there we go, so I'm gonna run 6970s in Fear 3 alone with the same graphics settings, 0x anti-aliasing, that's single card, I don't think it's gonna run that well anyway, and then I'm gonna run that on both platforms and I'm gonna see if it's CPU related or if it's related to the quad SLI driver. Alright, well it seems to be a weird driver issue. In retrospect, maybe I should have chosen a more normal graphics configuration like maybe GTX 580 SLI or something like that. I couldn't use 6970 Crossfire because I know Crysis 2 behaves very strangely with it from some other benchmarking I did this weekend. Anyway, you can see here the 1100T with the 6970 gets 86.2 FPS at that setting, at 2560 by 1600 with this, yeah, so that's a substantially less powerful configuration, it has like about one quarter the GPU processing power. So now we're going to take the 2500K, run it with the 6970, see how it comes out, and that is what we will take to be our performance difference for Fear 3. Well that was rather anticlimactic, after all that, Fear 3 is a dead tie. So thank you for checking out my coverage of the 2500K versus the 1100T in quad SLI and in Fear 3, running a 6970. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.