 You guys would probably be very surprised to hear how many people ask me if there's an advantage to running AMD Radeon cards on an AMD platform versus running a GeForce card on an AMD platform. And I can tell you guys now before I actually finish running the benchmarks, no there is not. The CPU performance times sort of the GPU performance multiplier, you know, factor in any bottlenecking that's occurring where one of them is not feeding the other quickly enough. That's pretty much how much performance you get. You know, PCI Express, this is an industry standard and CPU performance is CPU performance and GPU performance is GPU performance. However, for those of you out here there who are running AMD based systems, I've decided to do some bulldozer benchmarks with the GTX 680 versus the Radeon HD 7970. So what I want to achieve in all of this is to give the AMD guys a good idea of how these two cards will perform. Now I am, see I don't know what to tell you guys about the CPU. This is an FX 8140, which is some like weird CPU that doesn't seem to be existing anywhere and I don't know if it's ever even going to be released. But what I've done is I've clocked it at 4 GHz so that should be fairly equivalent to something like an 8150 in terms of performance in most games. 4 GHz is an easy overclock so just bear that in mind. We're going to be comparing this AMD 8 core at 4 GHz to my stock speed 3930K platform and then we're also going to be comparing this CPU performance with the 7970 to this CPU's performance with the GTX 680. So just bear that in mind in all of my results and stay tuned here guys. Just so you guys know, if you didn't watch my regular performance review with my 3930K platform on LGA 2011, I am using all ultra maximum settings other than maxing out the anti-aliasing which I've got pegged at 4X, which for me is a pretty comfortable setting at 1080p. I find that reduces most of the jeggies for me personally so since I'm the one doing the video I guess I get to pick things like that. So yeah, we're at 1080p, we're at ultra or high or whatever they want to call it, settings across the board on all of these games and here I go. So now I'm testing the GTX 680 on this same platform and be prepared. Crazy stuff's going to happen. Alright guys, well results are done so I guess you can kind of hang with me while I rearrange the spreadsheet a little bit. So I'm just going to hide some of the less relevant rows and we're just going to stay focused on Bulldozer 680 versus 7970 and then we're also going to pair all of these down to just the 680 and the 7970 on the 3930K platform. So these are using all of the same testing methodologies other than changing the CPU and changing the RAM. So the 3930K has 16 gigs of RAM and this one has only 8 gigs of RAM although I really can't imagine that will make a difference in anything other than power consumption so the 3930K should be at somewhat of a disadvantage because it does have more RAM onboard it. Other than that I think we're pretty darn near identical here. This is a Crosshair 5 formula and never mentioned that before from Asus and I think that's pretty much it. So here we go. So idle power is pretty darn close. I would say this is within margin of error for both of these systems so they're very close that way and once again I can't say necessarily that my results are, you know I should put like quotes here, yeah it's an FX8150 because this is a 95 watt TDP CPU so I don't know how much of a difference that's going to make to things like idle power consumption so grain of salt guys, grain of salt. 3D Mark 11 scores are pretty much not affected. This is yeah very very close but we do see a slight performance decrease on the AMD platform. Over here, see I didn't take temp readings this time around because this is just card temperatures. I don't really care about that the second time around. For Battlefield 3 you can see performance is pretty near identical across the two platforms so in very graphically demanding games you can often encounter scenarios where just because the CPU is slower doesn't mean that it will perform any differently in that game as long as you have the graphical horsepower. Another thing to bear in mind is that Battlefield 3's Frostbite engine is heavily multi-threading aware so the fact that this is 8 cores versus 6 may be making a difference for it. Hard to say at this point in time. Crysis 2 we see a fairly significant drop in performance going from the 3930K to the FX8150 we see about 10% and this is consistent on both the GTX 680 and the 7970. The Witcher 2 sees very similar performance I would consider this to be sort of pretty close to margin of error here guys. Dirt 3 sees a significant performance drop on both the 680 and the 7970 moving to the other platform although the 680 takes a bigger hit than the 7970 for some reason. Batman Arkham City is pretty darn close especially on the 680 and takes a bit of a hit on the 7970. Finally Skyrim just falls off a cliff with the Bulldozer CPU versus using the 3930K so you can see this is just a disaster. Overall power consumption is fairly higher on the AMD platform pretty much across the board so you can see that it must be somewhere in the CPU or the motherboard probably the CPU given that Bulldozer is a bit of a power hog. We are using more power than the 3930K Intel's 6 core unlocked processor on the LGA 11 platform and I think that pretty much wraps it up so in conclusion no there is no real advantage to pairing this with this other than that you get like this wicked matching color scheme thing going on with like your red motherboard and your red AMD performance edition ram and Radeon graphics card. I mean that's cool that's fine and that is a perfectly legitimate reason if you ask me to buy one component over another I'm totally shallow like that but in terms of technical practical reasons there is no issue pairing up a GeForce with an AMD chip or a Radeon with an Intel chip. Thank you for checking out this episode of Linus Tech Tips. Don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos.