Conclusion
What about this other CPU that’s not on the list? How do I know if it’s a good deal or not?
This will happen. In fact, it’s guaranteed to happen because availability and prices change quickly. So how do you know if that CPU you’ve got your eye on is a good buy in its price range?
Here is a resource to help you judge if a CPU is a good buy or not: the gaming CPU hierarchy chart, which groups CPUs with similar overall gaming performance levels into tiers. The top tier contains the highest-performing gaming CPUs available and gaming performance decreases as you go down the tiers from there.
However, a word of caution: this hierarchy is based on the average performance each CPU achieved in our charts test suite using only four game titles: Crysis, Unreal Tournament 3, World in Conflict, and Supreme Commander. While we feel this represents an acceptable cross-section of typical gaming scenarios, a specific game title will likely perform differently. Some games, for example, will be severely graphics subsystem-limited, while others may react positively to more CPU cores, larger amounts of CPU cache, or even a specific architecture. We also did not have access to every CPU on the market, so some of the CPU performance estimates are based on the numbers similar architectures deliver. Indeed, this hierarchy chart is useful as a general guideline, but certainly not as a gospel one-size-fits-all perfect CPU comparison resource.
You can use this hierarchy to compare the pricing between two processors, to see which one is a better deal, and also to determine if an upgrade is worthwhile. I don’t recommend upgrading your CPU unless the potential replacement is at least three tiers higher. Otherwise, the upgrade is somewhat parallel and you may not notice a worthwhile difference in game performance.
| Gaming CPU Hierarchy Chart | |
|---|---|
| Intel | AMD |
| Core i7 Extreme 965, 975 Core i7 860, 870, 920, 940, 950, Core i5 750 Core 2 Extreme QX9775, QX9770, QX9650 Core 2 Quad Q9650 | |
| Core 2 Extreme QX6850, QX6800 Core 2 Quad Q9550, Q9450, Q9400 Core 2 Duo E8600, E8500 | Phenom II X4 Black Edition 955, 965 |
| Core 2 Extreme QX6700 Core 2 Quad Q6700, Q9300, Q8400, Q6600, Q8300 Core 2 Duo E8400, E8300, E8190, E8200, E7600, E7500, E6850 | Phenom X4 945, 940, 920, 810 Phenom II X3 720 Black Edition Athlon II X4 630 Athlon II X3 435 |
| Core 2 Quad Q8200, E7400, E6750 Core 2 Extreme X6800 | Phenom II X4 910, 805, 905e Phenom II X3 710, 705e Phenom II X2 545, 550 Black Edition Phenom X4 9950 Athlon II X4 620 Athlon II X3 425 |
| Core 2 Duo E7200, E6550, E7300, E6540, E6700 Pentium Dual-Core E6300, E6500 | Phenom X4 9850, 9750, 9650, 9600 Phenom X3 8850, 8750 Athlon 64 X2 6400+ |
| Core 2 Duo E4700, E4600, E6600, E4500, E6420 Pentium Dual-Core E5400, E5300, E5200 | Phenom X4 9500, 9550, 9450e, 9350e Phenom X3 8650, 8600, 8550, 8450e, 8450, 8400, 8250e Athlon II X2 240, 245, 250 Athlon X2 7850, 7750 Athlon 64 X2 6000+, 5600+ |
| Core 2 Duo E4400, E4300, E6400, E6320 Celeron E3300 | Phenom X4 9150e, 9100e Athlon X2 7550, 7450, 5050e, 4850e/b Athlon 64 X2 5400+, 5200+, 5000+, 4800+ |
| Core 2 Duo E6300 Pentium Dual-Core E2220, E2200, E2210 Celeron E3200 | Athlon X2 6550, 6500, 4450e/b, Athlon X2 4600+, 4400+, 4200+, BE-2400 |
| Pentium Dual-Core E2180 Celeron E1600 | Athlon 64 X2 4000+, 3800+ Athlon X2 4050e, BE-2300 |
| Pentium Dual-Core E2160, E2140 Celeron E1500, E1400, E1200 | |
Summary
There you have it folks: the best gaming CPUs for the money this month. Now all that’s left to do is to find and purchase them.
Also remember that the stores don’t follow this list. Things will change over the course of the month and you’ll probably have to adapt your buying strategy to deal with fluctuating prices. Good luck!
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E7500 still going strong and on the list....
AFAIKT, Athlon II 425 runs at 2700 MHz, not 2800 MHz.
Kinda strange that here on toms I5-750 is superior in gaming, well true if u want to play on low resolution and with no AA, AF and so on, because at 800x600 the I5-750 whipes the floor with AMD 965, but then something a bit strange happens when u turn the heat up.
Source:
Testet with radeon 5850.
Devil May Cry 4 Benchmark[/b]
Benchmark Reviews uses the DirectX 10 test set at 1920x1200 resolution to test with 8x AA (highest common AA setting available between GeForce and Radeon video cards) and 16x AF. The benchmark runs through four different test scenes, but scenes #2 and #4 usually offer the most graphical challenge.
Sene 2
I5-750 - Looses with 4,8 frames
Sene 4
I5-750 – Looses with 4,4 frames
Far Cry 2 Benchmark
Og Far Cry is nown to be good on the Intel arcitecture
Benchmark Reviews used the maximum settings allowed for DirectX 10 tests, with the resolution set to 1920x1200. Performance settings were all set to 'Very High', Render Quality was set to 'Ultra High' overall quality, 8x anti-aliasing was applied, and HDR and Bloom were enabled.
I5-750 – Looses with 1,8 frames
Resident Evil 5 Tests
Benchmark Reviews uses the DirectX 10 version of the test at 1920x1200 resolution. Super-High quality settings are configured, with 8x MSAA post processing effects for maximum demand on the GPU. Test scenes from Area #3 and Area #4 require the most graphics processing power, and the results are collected for the chart illustrated below.
Area 3#
I5-750 – Loses with1,6 frames
Area 4#
i5-750 – Looses with 3,7 frames
Source:
And even against the i7-940 with radeon 5870 on max settings, 1920x1080, the phenom 965 wins 2 of 4, ties in on, looses 1 on.
Shoudnt this tell that to base that a cpu is good with low resulutions is worthless when it comes to real gameplay.
Well the link sources isnt in the post over, dont know why, but the numbers are from Benchmarkreviews and Guru3d.
Fixed.
So far on the net with tests with powerful grapic cards the phenom wins 80% against nehalm, well there are only 2 test on the web where real settings are appliend, but that will change now, since Toms is doing it so far good "balanced gamer rigg artichles
Edit:
Thanks Izzycraft
And edit a lil bit more
If my memory serves me right Phenom does better than i7 with the nvidia gtx 285 when the grapic card is on max settings to, confirmed here on toms among other places.
The athlon x3's DO NOT have 3 mb of l2 cache !
This needs changed asap...
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 452-2.html
The athlon x3's DO NOT have 3 mb of l2 cache !This needs changed asap...http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 452-2.html
Fixed!
oh hilarity ensues
edit: osse you can edit your posts but finding the forum and post is not that easy, you can even delete a post if you go into full edit instead of a quick edit
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] w=0&nojs=0
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/forum-56.html
And the reason why cpus are tested at low resolutions is more academic then practical yes but it does show in theory that what a cpu can do when other parts of the computer isn't holding it back mainly the gpu as "practical" test can't show everyone's personal set up and quarks of a system
pentium dual-core E2160 still there..
@ osse, 1 to 4 frames difference is not something I would call worthless performance... That can easily be a difference because of slightly other parts besides the cpu as it would be the cpu.
And if it were so that it was 1-4 frames slower that still doesn't mean it is slower on all facets of cpu usage. ofcourse gaming is important but other tasks it will outperform amd easily.
@ osse, 1 to 4 frames difference is not something I would call worthless performance... That can easily be a difference because of slightly other parts besides the cpu as it would be the cpu.
And if it were so that it was 1-4 frames slower that still doesn't mean it is slower on all facets of cpu usage. ofcourse gaming is important but other tasks it will outperform amd easily.
Actually with latest prices in the $100-150 cataogory we have
Phenom 2 x4 925 @ $141
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6819103656
Locked multi but still good to go for clocking hehe
I have asked this question op a number of forums but nobody seems to know the answer. What is the CPU design software that AMD and Intel use for designing their processors. Maybe Cadence products?
Good to consider then build around. Will help with the few builds I am considering.
@2shea
I for the most agree that 1-4 frames isnt much, and it wasnt in that context i refered to the 2 tests where high end grapic card is used 5850/5870.
While there is no diffrense in 100 vs 130 frames, there can be a diffrense between 40 and 44 frames in gamer experience. However small.
It was in the context to the claim that i5-750 is superior in gaming. When it actually loose when you have settings that gamers want.
Edit:
And i was actually more supprised when guru matched i7-940 vs phenom 965, espeially in Far cry, wich should be a very good game for Nehalm, I7-940 wins big times on 1024x768, but looses with a few frames when we go to 1920x1200.
with gamer settings : high-quality DX10 mode with 4x AA (anti-aliasing) and 16x AF (anisotropic filtering).
Same happens in Brother In Arms, i7-940 wins big time 1024x768, and looses with a few frames in 1920x1200. In crysis they tie at 1920x1200, and resident evil I7-940 wins good.
But the conclusion so far of tests out on the web with gamer setting , is that overall phenomII 965 is abel to pull a few more frames out of the radeon 58xx, both against the i5-750 and i7-940. On stock speed.
And that is the oposit result of what you would expect from testing in low resolutions and no grapic effects tells us, there both i5-750 and i7-940 wins big time.
I just bought an i750 at Microcenter for $149. Great steal, not sure if they have pics of Andy Grove or something, but that changed the price/performance enough for me to go Intel this time around - I'd been looking at Phenom II x3s until that find.
It would be nice to do an overclocked section, so we could compare overclcocked to non overclocked processors. It is being done here:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/overclocked_cpus.html
Uhm... what is E7500 doing there, when there is also E6500, which supports virtualization... unlike the E7500?
Uhm... what is E7500 doing there, when there is also E6500, which supports virtualization... unlike the E7500?