AMD 8350 & 7970 Gaming Rig Review

That's gotta be a typo. I can't believe a 7870 outperforms a 7970 regardless of what processor it has. No benchmarks show the i5 being that much faster than a 8350. In fact most show the 8350 as being fairly close until you get into the multi gpu/monitor setups.
 
you do know that's a 7870 Tahiti..

Shouldn't matter. That's still a slower card than a 7950. All the benchies I've seen show a 8350 hanging in fairly close with a i5 in almost everything and even beating it in a couple newer games. I'm not denying the i5 is the faster chip and when compared using the same card, I know it's faster but I just can't believe that the fastest single card on the market is being held back by a 8350 so much that it's beaten by a card that costs nearly half as much. My GTX670 is matching all the benchmarks I'm seeing in GTX670 reviews using i7's so my Bulldozer which is 10-15% slower than a Piledriver definitely isn't holding my card back.
 
Last edited:
All I can say is if you look at the videos posted over the past 2-3 previous pages you can see quiet clear that there is not that much of a difference if any. Where there are differences, it's so little that if you had either system you wouldn't be noticing them.

As for benches, well you don't play benchmarks and unless you are buying the CPU to benchmark all day erry day, they mean nothing in terms of real world performance.

As already mentioned as well, the 8350 lacks single thread performance, this is where the i5 pulls ahead, but for anything multi thread the 8350 wins. You also have to give bonus points to the 8350 seen as it's cheaper, yet still faster in a lot of things. It even gives the 3770k a run for it's money in multi thread performance.

TL;DR

The 8350 is actually a good choice for a gaming rig, the differences in performance are not significant enough to even matter and multi thread performance is much better.

Wann save money and still have good performance? Get the 8350.
Want good performance and something that will score high in benchmarks? Get the 3570k.

8350 vs 3570k - Bear in mind the 8350 is £150 and the 3570k is £180

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/697?vs=701

8350 vs 3770k - Bear in mind the 8350k is £150 and the 3770k is £250

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/697?vs=551
 
Last edited:
All I can say is if you look at the videos posted over the past 2-3 previous pages you can see quiet clear that there is not that much of a difference if any. Where there are differences, it's so little that if you had either system you wouldn't be noticing them.

As for benches, well you don't play benchmarks and unless you are buying the CPU to benchmark all day erry day, they mean nothing in terms of real world performance.

As already mentioned as well, the 8350 lacks single thread performance, this is where the i5 pulls ahead, but for anything multi thread the 8350 wins. You also have to give bonus points to the 8350 seen as it's cheaper, yet still faster in a lot of things. It even gives the 3770k a run for it's money in multi thread performance.

TL;DR

The 8350 is actually a good choice for a gaming rig, the differences in performance are not significant enough to even matter and multi thread performance is much better.

Wann save money and still have good performance? Get the 8350.
Want good performance and something that will score high in benchmarks? Get the 3570k.

8350 vs 3570k - Bear in mind the 8350 is £150 and the 3570k is £180

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/697?vs=701

8350 vs 3770k - Bear in mind the 8350k is £150 and the 3770k is £250

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/697?vs=551

Wanna save even more money?? Get a 8320 ;)

But yeah I totally agree, I cannot for one second believe that a 7870 XT with an i5 beats a 7970 and 8350 combo, it makes zero sense. Something must have been wrong with his testing methodology because that just doesn't agree with the results that everyone else is getting.
 
I believe it on a couple games. Civilization V and Starcraft 2 for example really give AMD processors fits so a i5 probably could beat it with a slower video card in those games because when compared with the same GPU, Intel wins in those games by a country mile.

But with games like Crysis 3 and BF3 where AMD actually performs slightly better and then all the others where AMD is only a little behind Intel, I don't see how it could.
 
Then in the case of that test the GPU is obviously doing most of the work.

I'd like to see that test repeated with Hitman : Absolution tbh.

It'll depend on the GPU. It doesn't matter how fast the CPU is, your frame rates will only be as high as your GPU can dish out. You can have the fastest processor in the world and you're still not gonna max out Crysis 3 with a 7770.

So a 8350 while being slower than a 3570K is still fast enough to feed a 7970 or GTX680 enough to get it to close to its full potential. Now if you add a 2nd GTX680 then you'll start to see the extra horsepower of the 3570K come into play and the Intel system will start to pull ahead.

But for single card systems at 2560x1600 and below, a 8350 will perform pretty close to a 3570K.
 
It'll depend on the GPU. It doesn't matter how fast the CPU is, your frame rates will only be as high as your GPU can dish out. You can have the fastest processor in the world and you're still not gonna max out Crysis 3 with a 7770.

So a 8350 while being slower than a 3570K is still fast enough to feed a 7970 or GTX680 enough to get it to close to its full potential. Now if you add a 2nd GTX680 then you'll start to see the extra horsepower of the 3570K come into play and the Intel system will start to pull ahead.

But for single card systems at 2560x1600 and below, a 8350 will perform pretty close to a 3570K.

Not sure I agree on that. I have a Xeon E31220 (I5 2400 more cache no IGPU or whatever they call it now) and going on the difference a slight overclock made to Hitman I would imagine the 6100 would struggle something rotten.

That's going on the thread performance, given that Sandybridge still beats Piledriver hands down.

http://forum.overclock3d.net/showthread.php?t=52821

Is basically why I mentioned Hitman : Absolution because it quite clearly needs raw CPU power as well as graphical grunt. Obviously that game is far more CPU dependent than BF3 which is getting on a bit now.
 
yeah i can say from experience that hitman is awful on my rig, i think piledriver might be a fair bit better than my bulldozer chip though
 
Not sure I agree on that. I have a Xeon E31220 (I5 2400 more cache no IGPU or whatever they call it now) and going on the difference a slight overclock made to Hitman I would imagine the 6100 would struggle something rotten.

That's going on the thread performance, given that Sandybridge still beats Piledriver hands down.

http://forum.overclock3d.net/showthread.php?t=52821

Is basically why I mentioned Hitman : Absolution because it quite clearly needs raw CPU power as well as graphical grunt. Obviously that game is far more CPU dependent than BF3 which is getting on a bit now.

No I think we're on the same page. I'm not saying the CPU makes no difference, I'm saying if you don't have the GPU muscle, all the CPU speed in the world isn't going to matter.

Your overclock let your GTX670 stretch it's legs a little more but eventually you'd reach a point where your GPU was going as fast as it could and the extra speed of the CPU won't help any.

Now while I agree the 6100 is a horrible chip, a 8350 is not and it's fast enough to feed any single card so that you're getting relatively the same frame rates as with an Intel at least close enough that you wouldn't notice in real world gameplay.
 
Last edited:
Oh yeah of course :)

I'm hoping to get 4ghz out of my CPU if I ever get a motherboard to put it in.... When I do I will re-run all of the benchmarks to see how much clock speeds affect min FPS (because that's all I really care about tbh).

I also find it interesting that the guy benched BF3 single player, when the 64 player maps are the most taxing.
 
Back
Top