The 990FX Chipset Arrives: AMD And SLI Rise Again

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AMD is laying the foundation for its Socket AM3+, Bulldozer-based Zambezi processors with the 990FX chipset, functionally identical to 890FX. The big news is that motherboard vendors are licensing SLI again, and we want to compare performance to Intel.

Benchmark Results: Lost Planet 2 (DX11)

In contrast to Metro, Lost Planet 2 (also a DirectX 11-enabled title) is much more sensitive to platform performance.

We’d expect any performance difference to be most pronounced at 1680x1050, and it is. With AA on or off, there’s a pretty noticeable delta that favors Intel’s Z68-based configuration.  

At 1920x1080, there’s still a pretty wide margin between Intel’s Core i5 and AMD’s fastest Phenom II. That gap narrows a bit once anti-aliasing is applied, though, and more of the emphasis is placed on graphics performance.

By the time we hit 2560x1600, both builds perform comparably. From there, it’d take a more powerful graphics setup to help alleviate the clear bottleneck: our GTX 570s in SLI.

Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini is an Editor Emeritus at Tom's Hardware US. He edits hardware reviews and covers high-profile CPU and GPU launches.