 Guys, this is the MSI 990 FX8 GD80 and it is an AM3 Plus motherboard featuring full support for SLI, Crossfire X and AMD Bulldozer 8 core CPUs. This is an FX8150 installed on a Crosshair V formula. Now the Crosshair V formula is the board that was used by 99% of the reviewers out there for their Bulldozer launch coverage. So what I'm aiming to do here is to find out whether the Crosshair V formula will perform any different from the MSI equivalent high-end gaming skew with a single 6970, 8 gigs of DDR3 memory and an 8150 FX8 core CPU from AMD. So I have done my first set of run-throughs. Now I can't get the Witcher 2 running properly right now. It's something to do with the game updating and my save files won't load and so I'm going to have to examine that. But for now I want to bring you the results that I can. So what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be running the Crosshair V, the 990 FX8 GD80 and then for completeness sake I'm going to throw a 2500K into the mix and that will be on a Z68 board right there, so that's the Z68A GD80, just to see how the 8150 compares against its closest competitor price-wise on the Intel side. So I've done my run-through with the 990 FX8 GD80 board now. Let's see what it's called down there. Just so you guys know that I'm telling you what it is. And I've only encountered one very curious result. So on the top are my numbers with the 990 FX8 and on the bottom are my numbers with the Crosshair V. So you can see these gaming numbers are very close. Metro 2033 is within a margin of error. Battlefield Bad Company 2 within margin of error. Crisis 2 within margin of error. And Lost Planet 2 is identical. And finally Dirt 3 is well within margin of error. But Cinebench for some reason performed dramatically better on the GD80. So before I put my CineBridge 2500K on the bench, I'm going to go and I'm going to throw the Crosshair V back on there just to give it another shot at that Cinebench benchmark. Let's see if maybe it was just an anomaly. Looks like it was purely an anomaly guys. 5.84 is well within margin of error of 5.82. So I'm going to go ahead and say that these boards perform pretty much identically with the 8150 at stock speeds. Now I'm going to go ahead and get on with my Sandy Bridge testing. Well my Sandy Bridge numbers are complete so this is with the same test platform except for a different CPU and different motherboard obviously. And I think the overall conclusion is that a whole lot is being made about the Bulldozer's performance or lack thereof against its Sandy Bridge counterparts. But looking at the test settings that are being used in a lot of places, I don't really feel they're all that realistic. So for all of the games that I'm running, I'm running at 1080p which is the full resolution of this monitor which most gamers are transitioning towards if they're not already using it. And then I'm also running at high details with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering on in most cases. And you can see here that in most of the games, most of the applications I'm running, my average and my minimum frames per second are very, very playable at those settings. So yeah. This is one of the things where I'm kind of looking at it going, well, okay, yes, the 2500K does perform better. You can see there are games where it really pulls away such as Crisis 2 where we're looking at outside the margin of error in terms of the performance difference, somewhere in the 8% range. Lost Planet 2, it does perform a little bit better. Remember that one's a canned benchmark so that should be fairly representative. Dirt 3, it does pull ahead. This is a CPU limited game and it's about 5% better. But it doesn't perform as well in something heavily threaded like Cinebench, for example. I mean, yes, it's not that far behind considering the fact that the 2500K is a cheaper processor than the 8150, but you also have to bear in mind that the platform's more expensive. If you want to build a gaming rig, like let's say dual 6970 gaming rig with high end gaming CPU, bunch of RAM, et cetera, et cetera, you're looking at on the low end a 970 chipset for AMD or a 990X, which are both still Crossfire capable. Whereas with Intel, if you want a Crossfire or SLI ready board, you have to use a P67 or a Z68 board, which are significantly more expensive. So you do have to factor that in. So thank you for checking out my little video where we did establish that there's really no difference in performance between one 990FX board and another with the Bulldozer 8150FX chip and then that the performance delta between the 2500K and the 8150 is, while significant, yes, it is significant in some cases, may not be a deal breaker, especially if you're running at sort of real world resolutions in real world games. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.