 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. Welcome to yet another examination of the 3570K versus the FX8350 Intel versus AMD, with a different spin on it. We're going to be looking at Windows 7 and Windows 8 performance, and showing you not only which is the best hardware platform for your gaming today, but also which is the best software platform with a variety of games. So I'd like to introduce you to our two test platforms. First of all, we've got the Crosshair 5 formula with an FX8350 at 4.6 GHz and 8 gigs of Blackline Mushkin memory, 1600 MHz, nothing special about it, CL9 memory, I know it looks special, but that copperhead spreader is just for looks. Then our other bench is a 3570K at 4.2 GHz, a Maximus 5 formula, 8 gigs of that same memory for consistency, and we're running a 660Ti overclocked in both of the systems. So we've got a Windows 8 and Windows 7 SSD, and then we're running on an AX850 with an H100 for our cooling. Now the reason we went with those overclocks on the CPUs is that they are overclocked, but conservatively. Anyone with these chips should be able to attain these overclocks. We've also overclocked them proportionally close to their maximums. Typically people are getting anywhere from 4.8 to 4.9 on an 8350, and anywhere from around 4.4 to 4.5 on a 3570K. So the real question here is why are we testing this? And the reason for it is that you guys asked us to. You asked us to do an in-depth examination of the 3570K versus the 8350, and we want to look at it from every angle possible. So we've got a baby touching the mic. Can you let go of that, sir? Alright, so we're going to be looking at it with anti-aliasing, without anti-aliasing, on Windows 8, on Windows 7. We're also going to be looking at some different scenarios, like running higher speed memory on both platforms to see how that affects it. So guys, stay tuned. Make sure you're subscribed so that you're going to see all of our coverage of this. Another thing that I'd like to bring up on this one is the cost difference between these chips. This was brought up on the last video. They don't cost exactly the same, especially when you factor in the different costs of the platforms. So we ran a quick cost analysis here, showing you guys that the platforms are not really quite equal. So the 3570K is around 220 to 240 bucks, and the 8350 is around 200 to 220 bucks, depending where you're shopping. So there's already about a $20 difference. However, we always factor in overclocking, because we believe we've done enough guides on overclocking that any enthusiast should be doing it. But you cannot overclock an Intel platform unless you have an overclocking-friendly chipset, like a Z68 or Z77 chipset. However, on AMD, you can buy a cheapo 970 board, and you can overclock your chip. So our cheapest Z77 board is 120 bucks that we found, whereas our cheapest, not even quite the cheapest, but the cheapest one I'd be confident putting an 8 core on was around 80 bucks. So there is potentially up to a $60 difference in the prices between these platforms. But you might say you don't like to see us compare, you know, non-equal chipset tiers. But even if you take boards that we would consider pretty equivalent, like the Crosshair V formula and the Maximus V formula, there's a $50 difference in price between these boards. Now, arguably, the Intel board does have more bells and whistles. So it has lighting effects on it, and it has, you know, more onboard buttons and doodads and better onboard sound. Yes, it does have things the AMD board doesn't, but these are similar class of products. And so you're looking at as much as a $70 difference then between the two platforms. So bear that in mind as you look at the performance results that we're about to present. In our first game, Far Cry 3, which you can check out our benchmarking procedure for by clicking the link below, we saw a significant performance improvement going from Windows 7 to Windows 8. It was a little less than 10 percent, but it was reproducible and it was anywhere from about 5 to 8 percent for both platforms. We didn't really see any changes in the positioning with the, I mean, with both of them being within margin of error. We'd say this is a tie between the $8350 and the $3570K in terms of performance. Remembering the $8350 platform could be cheaper. With Crysis 3, we saw something really cool. In Windows 7, when Slick fires the explosive arrow at the turret, we've seen this time and time again on the AMD platform, the FPS dips to around 20 frames per second. With whatever optimizations Microsoft has made in terms of leveraging more cores better in Windows 8, we don't see it anymore. Both platforms dip to a minimum of around 30 FPS at that particular segment, although they don't on average actually perform any better on Windows 8 than Windows 7. So what that means to me is although minimums have smoothed out on both platforms, just more noticeably on the AMD one, the averages are not really any higher, which means maximums are down a little bit. That does deliver a better gaming experience though. Lower averages with higher minimums is better than huge averages with low dips. Our next game is Battlefield 3, and in this one we really just didn't see much change in terms of averages, but both platforms improved in terms of their minimum frames per second. So the 8350 went from 35 to 43, and the 3570K went all the way from 37 to 51 FPS, delivering a much smoother gaming experience, moving from Windows 7 to Windows 8. In Skyrim, Intel maintains its dominance, however it should be noted that our Skyrim install has 18 mods from the workshop, so we're not really 100% sure how those affect the performance on individual chips, but we just kind of added mods until the game looked great and went with it, so for better or for worse, that's what we do in that game. The Intel chip did see about a 20% uplift in minimum FPS, resulting in better overall performance, even so, even compared to Windows 7. So Windows 8 once again wins as the gaming platform here. Dirt 3 is a bit of a different story, where the 3570K drops in performance, both in terms of minimums and in terms of averages. In Windows 7 it was a clear win for the 3570K, whereas in Windows 8 the 3570K is about a dead tie. However, it should be noted that when you're running at 150 plus FPS, unless you're running some kind of space age LCD monitor that does 240 FPS, then you're probably not going to notice. So there you go, guys. In Witcher 2, we didn't see much in the way of strange behavior, but we did see improvements again, going from Windows 7 to Windows 8. So the 8350 particularly went from 51 minimum to 59 minimum, although the averages didn't change much, so we're seeing another one of those situations where minimums improve, averages don't really improve much, which gives you smoother overall gameplay, whereas the 3570K only improved about 5%. And we're going to call this one pretty much a tie, although the 3570K does edge out the 8350. In Metro 2033, we see another huge improvement for the 8350 with the 3570K holding steady. So it was about a 10% improvement in minimum frames per second, which drove up the average, delivering a smoother gameplay experience than Windows 7, and bringing it actually slightly ahead of the 3570K, although it should be noted that this is within the margin of error for our tests. In Crysis 2, we saw pretty much no change across the board, which makes sense because this is a much older title and we shouldn't be seeing too many new optimizations that are implemented for it. So guys, while we showed you all the performance numbers here, there are some things that you didn't see. So Windows 8 looks like the stronger platform in terms of gaming performance, but we did have to jump through some hoops to get some of the games working at all. So for example, there were games that wouldn't work until you installed games for Windows Live, uninstalled the game, having already tried to install it once, and then completely reinstalled the game. The other thing that you don't see is that while the performance of the 8350 and the 3570K is quite similar, there's that price difference I talked about before, and also the fact that the 8350 does run hotter. So if your room is above, say for example, a garage and it's not air conditioned and it gets hot in the summer and you're on the south side of the house, then heat output may matter to you, and it does consume more power. So this comes down to the individual user, whether that's important to you or not. So it's that cost, performance, and other intangibles trade off. Thanks for checking out this video on Linus Tech Tips, and as always, don't forget to subscribe.