| disolitude said: I appreciate the comment above, but I do want to state that I enjoy debating. So yeah if the topic is repetitive, its most likely cause of that... :) One final statement I want to make is that Intel only pulled ahead of AMD in terms of gaming performance with Sandy Bridge. With the old i7s, they were trading blows with cheaper Phenoms II X4s and getting beaten by the similarly priced Phenom X6 cpus. Sure they had their 1000 dollar i7 980X, but for gaming the price is a non starter. But after Sandy Bridge it was obviously better to go with Intel for high end... I personally believe that if intel weren't such stingy fucks they could wipe the floor with AMD. They just don't want to set the bar too high but would rather milk every dollar they can out of incremental performance products. |
My Phenom 2 x6 HTPC is only roughly equivalent to the Core i5 750 in games that don't make use of 6 threads.
Single threaded performance is worse than the later Core 2 processors at the same clock.
However, to the Phenom 2's (And AMD's) credit, the CPU's really switched into another gear when you overclocked the NB to around 3ghz, which increased IPC by around 10-15% in some tasks, the memory controller in the Phenom's were never startling, so the CPU's benefitted greatly from it.
With that said and done, I actually noticed little improvement when moving from AMD to Intel in my primary PC when it came to gaming, I was running 5760x1080 resolution back then, so I was still always GPU limited.
Price/Performance was always in AMD's favor, except for the silly people like myself who shelled out $400+ for a Phenom 2 x6 on launch! :P
Where the real problem lies is with any games that are demanding yet are still single or dual threaded like Sins of a Solar Empire or StarCraft 2, AMD's CPU's just seems to fold, if those kinds of games are important to you, then I would advise to go for even Intel's Core i3.
And if I were to choose any AMD processor however, it would have to be 8320, clocks like a champ, extra 2 cores/1 module for the future.
People laughed at me on gaming forums when I got a Core 2 Quad Q6600 because most games were only single threaded back then, with a few that would use 2 threads, well, fast forward to today and that PC is still used for gaming (Donated it to a friend.), even with games like Battlefield 3, Civilization etc', the Core 2 Duo's would have folded, the extra $50 was well spent for the many extra years of use. (You will upgrade a GPU more often than a CPU in a gaming PC, so keep that in mind!)
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