AMD or Intel?

[Codex]

Originally Posted by Oldschool61

I dont know were your getting your cpu's but the amd 1100T is only 240 on newegg while the i7 2600K is 330. For that much difference I can get a mobo, 100T and ram for the price of the i7. And it would play CoD just fine. And I save $100

I compared the 2600 not the 2600k. The 'K' is the unlocked version and more expensive. But what I was highlighting was the power of two CPUs at roughly the same price.

Your not wrong in what your saying about using the AMD's, in fact if all you want is a gaming rig them I would say go for AMD.

But remember that almost all CPU benchmarks are formulated around First Person Shooters who's game engines are heavily focused on eye candy which is almost entirely taken care of by the GPU. That's they show a $100 CPU performs almost on par as a $1000 CPU. But a flight sim needs to do many more calculations for things that aren't directly displayed on the screen, e.g. Weather modelling, Flight modelling, Damage modelling etc. Yes some First Person do this as well, but not to the level of details as what IL-2 or IL-S:CoD do. And don't forget about the other stuff that is usually associated with a flight sim - Hyper Lobby, TrackIR, Joystick mapping software etc. Using a flight sim for a benchmark will stress a CPU more and this is where Intel will generally do better than a similar priced AMD chip.

[WTE_Galway]

Assuming you decide INTEL the other issue to be considered is whether you want to invest money in a deprecated/outdated chipset.

The current Sandy Bridge 1155 chipsets replace the older 1156 i3/i5/i7 motherboard. It comes in two breeds:

a) The Sandy bridge P67 which allows overclocking of K series processors but needs a separate graphics card.
b) The Sandy Bridge H67 which does not overclock (even with a K) but enables on-board built in Intel graphics.

These two chipsets supersede the 1156 chipsets currently used by CPU's like the i5-750. The 1156 chipset will start to disappear.

Note that both the new Sandy Bridge 1155 chipset and the older 1156 chipsets used dual channel ram (not triple) and have a limited number of PCIe lanes - meaning that three or more graphic cards in SLI at once may bottleneck. ( Note most review sites are saying triple channel ram does not give a noticeable performance improvement in real life and the 1155/1156 chipsets appear fine with single or dual graphic cards. )




What does this mean ?

a) The 1156 is superseded and should only be a consideration if you can get a bargain basement price.

b) The 1366 chipset will also eventually be superseded with a Sandy Bridge version - but not till much later this year later this year. If you currently want triple channel ram, or three or more graphics cards, then you are stuck with the older 1366 chipset for a while longer.