The 990FX Chipset Arrives: AMD And SLI Rise Again
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.
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nice to see support for both videocard producers. especialy for nvidia. now you can do amd+nvidia not only amd+ati(amd)Reply
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stingstang Tom's, what the hell is this? "At the end of the day, it's the graphics cards which are the bottleneck."Reply
Did you go about benchmarking graphics cards, or was this a motherboard/cpu comparison? I'm tired of hearing this excuse all the time. We know you have a pair of 6990s and 590s in your shop. Get rid of that stupid bottleneck and DO IT RIGHT! -
saint19 I'd keep in mind that this performance review was made it with an AM3 CPU and not with the new generation.Reply -
-Fran- Thanks for the review, but at lower resolutions we all know that the CPU differences will become clear. So you just proved that if a game is taxing on the GPUs, both solutions are equal and when the graphics card ain't being taxed, CPU differences become apparent... Ok, thanks for proving what we already know once more (not being sarcastic here >_Reply -
-Fran- Uhm... that last comment of mine was cut in half with the missing char of that face... I guess that's an escape char; oh well.Reply
What is missing said something like:
...here "face"), but you said you wanted to test AMD's SLI on their 990FX vs Intel's SLI. So, IMO, you need less graphics horse power: like 2 GTS250's or 2 GTX460's or 2 GTX560's (not ti's) to tax the graphics subsystem and really show the differences. Maybe up the resolution also to really show if there is a difference between AMD's or Intel's SLI.
Thanks again for the Article, Mr Chris.
Cheers!