Picking A Sub-$200 Gaming CPU: FX, An APU, Or A Pentium?
We really like to hunt down great values in the processor space. Since our last round-up of affordable CPUs, AMD released its Llano-based APUs and Bulldozer-based FX family. Also, Intel introduced a handful of Sandy Bridge-based Pentium chips.
Benchmark Results: Metro 2033
Metro 2033 persists as one of the most demanding titles we’ve ever benchmarked.
Although average frame rates do scale up and down, the minimum result remains fairly constant.
It's tempting to pin this on one particularly-difficult sequence in the test, but we'll need to consult our performance over time charts to know for sure.
Sure enough, there's a big dip that brings every platform down to roughly the same result. That's indicative of a graphics bottleneck, where processing potential stops mattering. The rest of the test does reveal differences between the various CPUs and APUs, though.
AMD's A4-3400 obviously struggles, and the Athlon II X3 455 is also a little slower than the competition. Even the Pentiums under-perform compared to where we might have expected them to fall, suggesting that this title might be better-optimized for quad-core CPUs.
It’s interesting that the Core i3-2100 dips at the beginning of this metric, followed by AMD's A8-3870K. The Core i5 CPUs demonstrate admirable performance, but are bottlenecked by our fully-modern AMD graphics card at certain points in this test.
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Prev Page Benchmark Results: DiRT 3 Next Page Overclocking BenchmarksDon Woligroski was a former senior hardware editor for Tom's Hardware. He has covered a wide range of PC hardware topics, including CPUs, GPUs, system building, and emerging technologies.