 This video is brought to you by CM Storm, preferred choice of mice, headsets, and mechanical keyboards of Curse Gaming. Visit www.coolermaster-usa.com slash team underscore curse for more details. Guys, welcome to part four of our 3570K versus FX8350 gaming showdown. I'm gonna start with our platforms. We've got a Crosshair 5 formula with an FX8350 at 4.6 GHz. This overclock should be attainable by pretty much anyone running this chip on an overclocking ready platform, but there is some headroom to keep going. However, we have an equally conservative overclock on our 3570K running on a Maximus 5 formula. This guy's running at 4.2 GHz. Now, they're both running Mushkin Blackline memory. There's Copperhead heat spreaders on here, but there's nothing special about those. It's just regular 1600 MHz memory, and we're running a 128 gig SSD for our boot drive, an AX850 for our power supply, and an H100 for our cooler. Now, I specifically called out that you needed an overclocking ready platform. This is something I wanted to bring up because the cost of the platform, the cost difference between these platforms is not sheerly dictated by the cost of the chip itself. So the FX8350 is about $20 cheaper on average than a 3570K. However, these two boards actually have a $50 price difference, and if you look at what the bare minimum Z77 board costs, it's around $120, whereas you can get a 970A board as long as you're not planning to run a high-end dual GPU setup that you need. So even then, it supports 8x8x for crossfire operation. You can get one of those for around $80, so that's something to consider when you look at the performance numbers we're going to show you. Methodology-wise, we're using our usual approach, so our standard card is an MSI GeForce GTX 660 Ti Power Edition. This guy right here, we run it at a standard overclock that we always run this card on. You can check out all of our GPU over clocks on any of our video card reviews. We are using FRAPS to record average frame rates, however, we are aware of the new methodology of measuring frame times. However, there's also been, I mean, it's been an explosive time in GPU benchmarking, and the correct tools for measuring frame times actually don't yet exist, except with some very specialized equipment. So we're doing what pretty much everyone else is doing, and we're still using FRAPS to measure frame rates, but expect that to change sometime over the next little while as more tools become available. We do use in-game runs, so you guys are going to see little messages pop up if you want to see exactly how we benchmark each game. Just go ahead and click that, check it out, and then you can run your game the same way that we do and find out how your system stacks up. So you're going to see four scenarios on each graph, Windows 7 with Intel, Windows 7 with AMD, Windows 8 with Intel, Windows 8 with AMD. We're running anti-aliasing on all of the games this time around. We have a separate video where we ran with no anti-aliasing, and we're going to start with Far Cry 3. So in Far Cry 3, the only real change that happened was when we went from Windows 7 to Windows 8, both platforms improved in performance, particularly the Intel one went from 15 frames per second minimum to 24 frames per second minimum, delivering a much smoother experience, while the AMD platform was at 20 plus frames per second minimum on both Windows 7 and Windows 8. So it looks like Windows 8 comes ahead, but the actual results in terms of the average frames per second was about the same on both cards, giving you about the same gaming experience, regardless of which chip you choose. Crysis 3 is pretty much nothing to report here, guys. So the FX8350 and the 3570K perform about the same, and the performance doesn't really change from Windows 7 to Windows 8. In Battlefield 3, we saw a bit of a different story with both of them recording about the same average frame rates, so a little bit higher with the 8350 edging out the 3570K. Actually, I shouldn't say edging out, it's about 5% performance difference. However, it should be noted that because we're using real runs, the margin of error for our tests is a little bit higher, although we do run them multiple times to get them as accurate as possible. However, both platforms increased in minimum frame rates from 35 to 43 on the 8350 and from 37 to 51 when moving from Windows 7 to Windows 8. So there was less of a dip when you run into an intensive scenario on Windows 8 versus Windows 7. In Skyrim, there wasn't really much to report. The 3570K gets a clear win here versus the 8350, and performance didn't change going from Windows 7 to Windows 8. It should be noted that our Skyrim benchmark is run with about 18 custom mods enabled, and we haven't released our Skyrim benchmarking guide yet, but that will hopefully be coming sometime soon. In DiRT 3, this was one of the more dramatic changes. Without anti-aliasing, both chips were running at an average around 150 frames per second. Enabling anti-aliasing on this title had them both tanked to around half of what we were seeing previously. It should also be noted that they didn't really change in performance from Windows 7 to Windows 8 once again. Witcher 2, we saw performance improvements going from Windows 7 to Windows 8 in terms of the minimum frame rates. So on the AMD platform, we went from 52 to 57, and on the Intel platform, we went from 51 to 64. So Witcher 2 ran better on Intel, particularly on, well, not on Windows 7, but on Windows 8, it ran better on Intel, but not on Windows 7. So that was a very interesting observation. It also took the averages and put about a 10% difference in performance between the two chips, whereas on Windows 7, they were much, much closer, pretty much within margin of error. In Metro 2033, we saw performance improvement for the 8350 of about 10%, and we saw average frame rates for the Intel stay pretty much the same. They actually dropped a little bit, but again, margin of error, anything, you know, a few percentage points, we should pretty much not read too much into. Crysis 2, we didn't really see any optimizations go on from Windows 7 to Windows 8, so that pretty much leaves us with Intel being the clear winner for Crysis 2 if you still play that game, which I suspect most people do not, but we like to include it just because of the old, can it run Crysis? So there you go, guys. Windows 8 on the surface looks like the optimal gaming platform, whether you go AMD or Intel, and I mean, quite frankly, it's up to the individual viewer, whether you watch a video like this and go, this performance difference is worth this number of dollars to me. We're not going to make that decision for you. We're going to let you go do that. But it looks like Windows 8 is the optimal gaming platform. However, there were some issues that we encountered running our games on Windows 8, such as the requirement to install games for Windows Live before actually installing any games. Otherwise, it causes all kinds of hullabaloo and games just not launching and things like that and some other random glitchy behavior. It should be noted, though, that with some Googling, we did get all of the games working. So if you want that extra little bit of performance, that's me, then it might be the way to go. Thanks for checking out this video. 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