Test Systems And Benchmarks
We wanted to keep the comparisons crystal clear, so we're going to make it simple. We're pitting AMD's Athlon II X3 440 against a Core i7-920. Yes, the Core i7-920 costs more than three times as much as the Athlon II X3 440, but remember that game performance will be bottlenecked to a large extent by the graphics subsystem.
As far as graphics cards go, we test two configurations: one with a single Radeon HD 5850 and the other with two Radeon HD 5870s in CrossFire. We test the games across 1280x1024, 1680x1050, 1920x1080, and 2560x1600 resolutions.
Because the Core i7-920 utilizes triple-channel memory, we use three 1GB sticks for a total of 3GB of RAM. The dual-channel AMD platform will use two 2GB sticks for a total of 4GB. From our experience, the single gigabyte of RAM difference should have no effect on gaming performance, but if we see any disparity, we will make note of memory usage. The RAM timings and speed are identical between both systems.
We're using the Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P motherboard with an Athlon II X3 440 and the ASRock X58 SuperComputer with Intel's Core i7-920. Note that the 790X chipset on the Athlon board can't support full 16x PCI Express (PCIe) bandwidth for each graphics card. To keep things comparable, we put the second Radeon HD 5870 in a PCIe slot with 8x bandwidth when using CrossFire on the ASRock X58 board.
| AMD Test System | Intel Test System | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Athlon II X3 440 (Deneb) 3.0 GHz, FSB-200 MHz | Intel Core i7-920 (Nehalem)2.67 GHz, QPI-4200, 8MB Shared L3 Cache | ||
| Motherboard | Gigabyte GA-MA790XT-UD4P AMD790X, BIOS F7 | ASRock X58 SuperComputer Intel X58, BIOS P1.90 | ||
| Networking | Onboard Gigabit LAN controller | Onboard Gigabit LAN controller | ||
| Memory | Mushkin PC3-10700 4GB Dual-Channel 2 x 2,048MB,DDR3-1340, CL 9-9-9-24-1T | Kingston PC3-10700 3GB Triple-Channel 3 x 1,024MB,DDR3-1066, CL 8-8-8-19-1T | ||
| Graphics | Sapphire Radeon HD 5850725 MHz GPU, 1GB GDDR5 RAM at 1,000 MHz | |||
| Hard Drive | Western Digital Caviar WD50 00AAJS-00YFA500GB, 7,200 RPM, 8MB cache, SATA 3.0 Gb/s | |||
| Power | Thermaltake Toughpower 1,200W1,200W, ATX 12V 2.2, EPS 12v 2.91 | |||
| Software and Drivers | ||||
| Operating System | Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit | |||
| DirectX version | DirectX 11 | |||
| Graphics Drivers | ATI Catalyst 10.3 | |||
| Benchmark Configuration | |
|---|---|
| 3D Games | |
| Crysis | Patch 1.2.1, DirectX 10, 32-bit executable, benchmark tool, High Settings, No AA, No AF |
| Far Cry 2 | DirectX 10, in-game benchmark Ultra-High Settings, No AA, No AF |
| S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat | Ultra High Preset, DirectX 11, EFDL, no MSAA, Sunshafts Benchmark |
| World In Conflict: Soviet Assault | DirectX 10, timedemo Very High Details, 4x AA/4x AF |
the whole thing seems to slightly contradict the 'balanced PC' articles though. why put such a cheap CPU in a system with such a powerful GPU? is the budget really going to be THAT tight?
except very high end gaming, I realy do not see a reason to go after the i7.
what I am missing from the article is the X3 vs Intel cpus in the same price range. maybe a followup would do some good :-)
I'd guess at least 90% of users never overclock anything.
To be fair though, probably 90% of Tom's readers do.
my thought is that for single card users (not necessarily 58xx type not because it's not good but is for sure not budget friendly) and normal monitors (1680x1050) a triple or even dual core amd is enough.