HD 6950 vs GTX 560 Ti

depends on your budget honestly. AMD has a few good options, go take a look at youtube, theres alot of amd vs nvidia reviews.

try to find reviews on both and base your decision. Motherboards.org guy usually compares nvidia and amd cards alot and has charts

ok ok.
1. 2500K. FX is not good for gaming. High-end gaming builds just have to go Intel these days.

2. ASRock Z68 Extreme3 to go with it, probably

3. The cards are very similar in performance. They trade benchmarks in games. I'd say that the 6950 tends to come out barely on top, but an OCed Ti would do better, and Nvidia tends to have better drivers. As Flint says, the processors' architectures are completely different, and you can't compare them by their core clocks, number of transistors etc.

Which is about half of games, I'd say (or a little less), and I think "all benchmarks" is going a little far
The 6950 wins every time except when the Ti does.
The Ti wins every time except when the 6950 does.

Except games that favor NVIDIA? OMG stop now before you start an amd vs NVIDIA fanboy war.
The 560ti overclocks well and the 448 core ti runs right around a stock 570. the 6950 and the 560ti are both good contenders, at this point it should be about budget and preference of drivers, which NVIDIA wins in the driver game.

not necessarily true about FX. they are still in infancy with the new bulldozer. im an intel fan, but FX is no slouch. you dont need 4.8+ to game these days. plus the multi tasking ability of the FX series is pretty good.

as for gaming, either one is good. its a matter of preference.

Prices are pretty similar, within the same ballpark (I editted my original post when you replied to mine; to add the prices)

6950: $230 - $290
560 Ti Fermi: $250 - $290
560 Ti: $210 - $270

I completely agree that the 2500K is significant improve over the 81xx FX.

http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 077-5.html

CPU Hierarchy FTW.

The 2500K is TOTL (Top of the Line) in regards to a Tier 1 Processor; and it has an amazing price point; for the shear processing power. Its pretty sad when AMD comes out and says they lost the gaming CPU's war; and won't compete down the road with Intel (In regards to gaming CPU's)

(See this article for reference : http://www.tomshardware.com/news/A [...] 14114.html )

World overclocking record is relevent to this how?



Nevertheless, if you want proof here you go:

http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 090-4.html

You can look to the bottom and see your 8150, however, yes I know that 3D Mark, and PCmark are favored towards intel. Keep reading.

Games @ 1080p, on there test setup.


Intel 2500K vs FX 8150 (they didn't do the 8120)
WoW: 91.9 to 67.7
Crysis: 49.9 to 49.2

You can call us 'intel fanboys' (including yourself) all you want, I am too, however please become 'objective', its the only way to help others without bias. They are both $209.99 on Newegg.

the ti has the new 1280mb version with 448 cores that is what i think the confusion is with the whole different type. Fermi isn't a type of ti. There's the 1gb, 2gb, and the 1280mb versions.

I have the FX 4100 @4.2 and it runs everything very well esp for the 109.00 price tag

It is at a great price you can't argue with that.

I think he's talking about the FX 4100. @ $109.

The article I posted before has performance on the 2500k, 2600k and 8150.

To get a little more detailed in description. The 8 Cores of the 8120/8150 which have 4 modules with 8 cores, is similiar to the 2600k, in that it has 4 Cores, with 8 Threads, inadvertently spreading processing between the 8 threads make it act like the octa core. Please please, i'm trying to keep this simple, without a lot of technical jargin. The 2500k only has 4 Cores and 4 Threads, so its capped at 4.

In summary:

The 8120/50, have 8 cores, and the 2600k has 8 threads, they're similiar in that aspect, however the 2500k and 2600k both out preform the 8150(they would do even better against the 8120, but it hasn't been tested against 2500/2600k's).

Keep in mind anything labeled "K" on an intel product means it doesn't come with a cooler, so one would need to purchase a good cooler, adding $50-$100 (For a good one). This would also mean that you could overclock very easily. As in my mind it comes 'stock' with a good cooler (since you have to buy one of your choosing).

As for your question: would you see a difference? Gaming wise a small 1-5% gain would be on average. However they big difference would be in longevity, the intel would probably last you a year or two longer between upgrading (since it preforms well over the FX 8xxx).

As for prices the 2600K is at $309.99 I think, + cooler = $350-$375 average, nearly double the cost of the FX 8120. To me I'm an avid believer in raw CPU power, as I favor it for games in the future (I ugprade CPU's every 3-4years, and GPU's every 1-2 years), so I side with longevity.

Thats my opinion, I hope its unbiased enough, as I'm getting tired and not wanting to re-link articles

Another note: it would be easy to switch from an ASUS Sabertooth AMD MoBo, to an ASUS Sabertooth Intel MoBo, they are the same price if i'm not mistaken. One thing to note on them though, is that they both only have 2 PCI Express 16x slots, so if you ever want to expand past that you would be limited. If you only want to SLI a 560 Ti 448 or 6950 or 560 Ti, in the near-term you wouldn't have a problem, but expansion past that would be difficult.

Unfortunately, I was hit hard by this decision, as I bought the board for Longevity in Jan for my I7-950, now I have to upgrade as I run a multiple monitor setup. Before I had 2x 260 GTX's, now that I'm in an upgrade year, SLI-ing two new cards, I'm keeping 1 260, to run my extra 2 monitors, so I have to upgrade my MoBo. Thats what happens when you like to have a bunch of monitors

Thank you, for the post. So I have decided to make the switch over to intel. Im not really looking to save money with this build, i'm looking to save the reget of going halfway on anything. I've found a webpage that has CPU rendering benchmarks for solidworks, in which the 2600K topped them all(w/o overclocking). Plus I hadn't really read much into the threading aspect of the CPU, I simply saw that the FX-8 series had 8-cores and assumed that it would perform better than the i7's quad-core setup... I was wrong. I am looking forward to seeing what the overclock potential is

4.4 ghz is completely different on the two platforms, actually. Sandy Bridge gets more of out every processor cycle than FX does, and so it's significantly better at the same clock rate. Here's a simple Tom's benchmark in which several modern processors competed on a single core and at exactly the same clock speed, 3.0 ghz. The 2500K finished their benchmark suite in 1:29.22; the old Thuban 1100T finished in 2:03.
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 74-15.html
FX wasn't out at the time of testing, but here's another bench that shows that FX is less efficient than the 1100T at equal clock rates, and therefore is significantly less efficient than the 2500K:
http://pcper.com/reviews/Processor [...] f-0?page=1
Clock rates do not carry over.
Bulldozer does not win multitasking "by far." Actually, it usually doesn't win at all. In Tom's FX review, they discovered that "[i]n the very best-case scenario, when you can throw a ton of work at the FX and fully utilize its eight integer cores, it generally falls in between Core i5-2500K and Core i7-2600K—which is where it should appear all of the time given a price tag between those two most relevant competitors. Sometimes FX manages to outperform the higher-end -2600K, but other times it’s embarrassingly bested by its predecessor in threaded workloads."
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 43-24.html

Certainly you can game with FX. It'll just be a waste of money. As the review above shows, the high-end FX processors are only worth buying in very limited situations in which its eight cores can be fully and consistently utilized.

You say that it all comes down to budget, but the only FX processor that comes anywhere near Intel's high-end models costs $270. The 2500K costs $220, and it outperforms FX in all but highly threaded situations.