Finally stable, but was it even remotely worth it? (depressing, beware, LOL!)

[blppt]

On a whim the other day, I took my old i7-2600K out of the box and put it in the recently-vacated Bitfenix Outlaw case with a P8Z68-V board I had laying around. I then took the 2 R9 290x(s) I had in my 9590/CHVF-Z setup and put them in the Sandy Bridge box. I also have a cheap Cooler Master rebadged-as-Rocketfish (Best Buy) air cooler for this cpu.

Now, I try not to think of all the money I've dumped into getting the 9590 stable and cooled, but trust me, it was quite a bit. Just as a matter of comparison, I loaded up a few games I play to see how the SB setup handled them.

It was very sobering to find that not one of them (including the Mantle ones) ran better on the 9590, even oc'd slightly to 5ghz, and some noticably worse.

For example: Guild Wars 2 (which I kind of expected) ran noticably worse; on the AMD system, you have to dump shadows from Ultra on the Intel System to no higher than Medium on the AMD system to get them to kind of run similar, and even then, the Intel system is slightly smoother overall. Then again, GW2, like many MMOs is poorly optimized for anything more than a couple of cores, so its not entirely shocking that Intel owns this game.

Dragon Age: Inquisition, OTOH is supposedly very good at loading multiple cores, with some people i've seen hitting all 8 at a decent rate, especially with Mantle. In this situation, you would *expect* that the FX 8 core systems would have an advantage---they have 8 true integer cores (only 4 shared FPUs though) and the Intel quads have 4 physical cores and 4 virtual ones. Plus, although AMD havent been rumored to do anything of the sort, you would *think* that spending so much money on developing Mantle (which one of its goals was to help AMD's CPUs get higher multi-threading in graphics engines) that there would be some advantage to running a Mantle game on AMD CPUs.

Not even remotely the case---as a point of reference, I use the area in Redcliffe Village as a test---running around by the chantry REALLY hits the system hard with the details all cranked up and 4x MSAA. On the Intel system, almost smooth as glass (not quite, but very close). On the 9590, whether overclocked to 5.0 or using the default clock 4.7, noticably less smooth.
.
Thief---another Mantle game runs slightly smoother on the Intel system---I use Stonemarket as a test, right around the church.

Bearing in mind that the i7-2600k/Z68 is now ancient, and was as close to plug-and-play right out of the box, and it really hit me hard how pointless this endevour to build an all-AMD system was, and just how much money I wasted. Granted, some of that was just to achieve 5ghz on an already-overclocked factory cpu, but some wasnt---and plus, the 9590 under load probably draws over twice the power of the 2600K (95W TDP).

The 9590 does stomp the Intel CPUs I have (my other box has a 3770k Ivy Bridge in it) in certain cpu benchmarks like Cinebench R15 (I get 790-800 on the CPU test with the 9590 @ 5ghz, about 720-730 with stock 4.7---the Ivy Bridge @ 3.9 gets like 704, Sandy lower than that), and it always completes heavy x265 encodes sooner, but those are heavily multi-core optimized benchmarks, and I doubt we will ever see that level of constant core-loading in games.

Anyways, I didnt write this to make anybody else feel bad, but I just came to this frightening realization today, LOL.

[sabah70]

lol we all know that intel performance wise is top right now........ you knew that wa s gonna happen. but I believe those of us that stick with amd do it for other reasons. lets hug it out and move on brother 🙂

[MeanMachine]

Totally agree with sabah70 .The Intel v AMD has been thrashed to death.

I also play GW2 and on max settings. It is only during big events that my fps will drop to 25-30 otherwise 60 -100. Most ppl experience the same.
Optimization for AMD CPU systems has not been forthcoming from NVidia driver developement. Why should they when ANETs core engine is CPU intensive and does not address all cores. Just an opinion.
I got my FX-9590 for posterity being the last in its line and have not been disappointed.
Unfortunately, I believe the later batches of specially binned FX-8350s have not been up to par.

[chris635]

sabah70 wrote:
lol we all know that intel performance wise is top right now........ you knew that wa s gonna happen. but I believe those of us that stick with amd do it for other reasons. lets hug it out and move on brother 🙂

MeanMachine wrote:
Totally agree with sabah70 .The Intel v AMD has been thrashed to death.

I also play GW2 and on max settings. It is only during big events that my fps will drop to 25-30 otherwise 60 -100. Most ppl experience the same.
Optimization for AMD CPU systems has not been forthcoming from NVidia driver developement. Why should they when ANETs core engine is CPU intensive and does not address all cores. Just an opinion.
I got my FX-9590 for posterity being the last in its line and have not been disappointed.
Unfortunately, I believe the later batches of specially binned FX-8350s have not been up to par.

I couldn't agree more.

[blppt]

MeanMachine wrote:
Totally agree with sabah70 .The Intel v AMD has been thrashed to death.

I also play GW2 and on max settings. It is only during big events that my fps will drop to 25-30 otherwise 60 -100. Most ppl experience the same.
Optimization for AMD CPU systems has not been forthcoming from NVidia driver developement. Why should they when ANETs core engine is CPU intensive and does not address all cores. Just an opinion.
I got my FX-9590 for posterity being the last in its line and have not been disappointed.
Unfortunately, I believe the later batches of specially binned FX-8350s have not been up to par.

Are you running with Supersampling on? I do, and unless there is something wrong with my system, it is never smooth with all options cranked, high-res textures and Ultra Shadows @ 1080p on the 9590 w/290x. The shadows is the thing that kills the framerate for me on the 9590. Also, I use Vsync -- I can never get used to the screen tearing without it. I mean, why bother getting a GPU that is able to show off pretty graphics when the screen is tearing them all up?

Worthy of note---I see you are using a Nvidia card, and IME, GW2 tends to favor nvidia over AMD with all options cranked (comparing a 780ti to a 290x). Its just a matter of Nvidia's driver team being so large versus AMD/ATI---they have more resources to devote to optimizing their drivers for games.

Also, I never expected GW2 to run as well on the 9590---its a notoriously single/double core optimized game (like a lot of MMOs), and of course Intel absolutely owns for that situation. But the Mantle experience was a bit sobering---it couldnt even match a 3+ year old 2600K in smoothness in a game that is apparently very well multi-core optimized to begin with (DA:I), and then gets the Mantle boost too.

One game I did notice runs slightly better on the FX is Company of Heroes 2---but so far, thats the only one I've come across.

I will say this---ithas been entertaining, frustrating, and always interesting working on my AMD box, whereas the PnP nature of the Intel boxes I built are comparitively dull.

[sabah70]

It sounded initially like you and mean machine were saying the 8350's have not been up to par lately but as I read it again I think you guys are meaning the chips they are using for 9590s are not up to par. I think I just confused myself 🙂

[sabah70]

awww please don't tell me that about the 8350...... I'm finally close to being able to pick one up 😞 So in your opinions what's the issue with the current batches of 8350. If I had a bigger case and could cool it I'm with you mean machine, I certainly would pick one up just because. I'm not feeling the fm/ socket chips at all and I'm really hoping amd does at least one more cool thing with the am3/3+. I guessing that's not gonna happen though.

[blppt]

sabah70 wrote:
awww please don't tell me that about the 8350...... I'm finally close to being able to pick one up 😞 So in your opinions what's the issue with the current batches of 8350. If I had a bigger case and could cool it I'm with you mean machine, I certainly would pick one up just because. I'm not feeling the fm/ socket chips at all and I'm really hoping amd does at least one more cool thing with the am3/3+. I guessing that's not gonna happen though.

Not sure what the question is? 😉 Remember, my money issues were due to the extreme power draw/heat of the 9590, none of which apply to your prospective 8350 purchase.