How a R3k AMD CPU can keep up with a R8k Intel CPU :)

[Progenix Oj101]

Let's examine that claim. It seems you have a misunderstanding of what custom order is or in this case semi-custom order. With a custom order you can order basically anything that the manufacturer is capable of making. There's still not much R&D involved though as you have to provide the design and the manufacturer won't accept responsibility if it fails. Otherwise if they are doing the R&D you pay for it even before you get a single chip. They don't recover their costs only when they sell you the chip.

With semi-custom you have to stay within the limits of what they are already making or developed. So let's look at what the two processors have. The Jaguar is capable of 2GHz. The XBoxOne reportedly bumped the clock to 1.75GHz recently from it's it's original 1.6GHz. The PS4 is similar so there's no higher spec here. MS and Sony actually kept the spec low to keep the cost down for them. Both have 8 cores split among 2 compute units with 2x2MB L2 cache. This is essentially two processors on one die. Nothing new really as dual processor computers have existed for decades and AMD has a number of 4 core processors. The two have 768 and 1152 GPU cores respectively. Here they are differently speced but it doesn't take R&D to change GPU core numbers. The tech supports any number of cores that you want and can fit on the die. XBox uses DDR3 while the PS uses GDDR5, the controllers for both are now in existence for years already so still no R&D that I can see. The XBox has 32MB embedded eSRAM. I'm not sure if this is on-die or just closely linked but in either case it isn't anything we haven't seen before. The XBox360 had embedded memory and so did the Pentium Pro if I'm not mistaken.

So if there was R&D involved show us where it was as I can't find anything that they would have had to develop for either chip. This seems to be your main motivator for the low margins that you claim but if they did have to do R&D it would be recovered from Sony and Microsoft separately or push up the price of the chip. They wouldn't get a free ride from AMD.

Just because multiple technologies exist doesn't mean you can mash them together without R&D costs.

And as I said you are sacrificing performance in one area for more performance in another. Performance sacrifice isn't something you usually pay extra for let alone R5k extra.

I guess that makes the FirePro and Quadro rubbish cards cause they don't excel at gaming but beat their desktop counterparts in design? That's the exact comparison you're making.

No you were using the price of SECOND HAND Intel compared to NEW AMD. That completely invalidates your question as AMD is less than Intel. The benchmarks you provided don't show the performance of an 8350 if the saving is spent on a better gfx card. If you're going to skimp on the motherboard just to make up for the price difference we might as well do that for AMD and go R600-R700 range. There's also nothing wrong with these AMD boards just as with your R1200 Intel board. Funny you're not considering a R600 Intel board.

I used a second hand Intel to compare to AMD's finest as it is faster in every respect while costing significantly less. If you want to look at new prices, have a look at the Core i5-4690, it is R 200 cheaper than the FX-8350 (they're around R 2,700 give or take, you said the FX-8350 is R 2,900 so we'll go with your pricing - even though the same place selling the i5-4690 for the price mentioned is doing the FX-8530 for almost R 3,300 I'll go with your pricing to swing as much weight in AMD's favour as possible. I could indeed choose a cheaper Intel board, but I went with one that offered enough features for your average gamer - four DIMM slots, two PCIe slots, six SATA ports.

The CPUs aren't the same. AMD is roughly R300 cheaper. Add that to the R700 price difference between similar quality AMD and Intel boards and you can get a substantially better gfx card.

No, you're right, the CPUs aren't the same. I've found the Core i5-4690/K for less than I can find the FX-8350. Oops. You said R 1,000 for the AMD motherboard, I said sub R 1,200 for the Intel board, the differences even each other out and you're looking at the same price for vastly different performance.

Second hand holds no argument. If you're willing to go second hand Intel with a "special" you happen to have stumbled upon I might as well go second hand AMD. So you lose the advantage that second hand Intel had over new AMD and AMD still wins.

Where's this second hand AMD that beats the Core i7-2600K for less money? R 2,000 for a P67 board and i7-2600K CPU is the normal selling price, a special would be when you can find something for the same price but with a 3770K. My whole point here is people are complaining that Intel offers poor value for money, I have shown that both a CPU/board combo that costs less than just the FX-8350 as well as a brand new Intel CPU for the same price as the FX-8350 beat the FX-8350 in gaming performance. In order for your argument to be valid I need you to show me a second hand AMD CPU/board combo that costs less than R 2,000 and beats the i7-2600K.

This seems to be another belief not founded in reality. Intel's mistakes have been of a much bigger magnitude. Add to Netburst the monumental and expensive flop that was Rambus. 3DNow was a good idea but unfortunately the market didn't adopt it. Still it doesn't compare to IA64, one is a few additional instructions and the other is a whole architecture. 3DNow is actually superior to MMX allowing parallel floating point operations where MMX only allowed parallel integer operations. AMD's biggest mistake here was to not extend it and allowing Intel to take the lead with SSE.

AMD's second biggest mistake was probably repeating Intel's mistakes like Slot 1. Intel's successes as well weren't always their own. If I'm correct their temp control tech comes from Cyrix. Cyrix processors were always super overclockable where Pentiums struggled with heat issues.

It seems you still don't understand why the Bulldozer lacked performance. AMD introduced a completely computerised design system. No more manual tweaks but at the same time you can do more complex designs. This is something that had to occur at some point.

Netburst was a huge failure, Rambus was a good move at the time as it offered better performance than DDR, no market adoption = fail no matter how good something may be so 3DNow! was definitely a bit of a fail.

Slot 1 wasn't a fail either, it was needed to keep manufacturing costs down. I covered it in an article I did for TheOverclocker on the history of overclocking, see part 2 A Brief History of Overclocking II: A Multiplier-Unlocked Look at the Next 15 Years of Overclocking in issue 25, page 18:

In the May of 1997, INTEL introduced the Pentium II 233 (S-Spec SL264), which was based on the P6 architecture used for the Pentium Pro. The micro-architecture was known as Klamath, and was manufactured using a 0.35 μm process. The Pentium II moved away from the Socket 7 package used by the original Pentium, moving instead to the Slot 1 cartridge system.

Due to the production process, the L2 cache and processor dies had to be bonded early in the socketbased CPUs - before testing of either component could be done. This meant that the cache had a very quick access time, but it came at a price. If either the processor or cache proved to be unreliable, both would have to be discarded. This wastage was not economically viable, and made the slot-based CPU a necessity.

Using the Slot 1 assembly, INTEL could place the processor and cache dies on a small printed circuit board called a SECC (Single Edge Connector Cartridge). Both dies could be tested before final assembly, and either could be discarded and replaced with a functional unit before the soldering tool place. The move to the SECC package resulted in two advantages. The first advantage was the ability to test the dies late in the assembly process leading to higher yields, which in turn led to lower prices. The second was that it did not have pins which could be easily damaged, but instead exposed tracks along the bottom edge of the circuit board.

If you're interested in the full article, here's part 1 - A Brief History of Overclocking: The First 15 Years at 14.318MHz) in issue 24, page 20.

No matter how advanced Bulldozer is, if we can't make use of it during its lifetime what use is it? How can that be considered anything short of a failure? What matters right now is what we can do right now, and the simple truth is that Bulldozer and Piledriver are simply not keeping up.

 

[Progenix Oj101]

The strength of the module design is that an additional core only takes up 50% more space and not 100%. In essence a module takes up 75% of the space of 2 full cores. The bulldozer was badly designed with the shared instruction pipeline being a bottleneck and causing a 5% performance loss. This was rectified with the Piledriver update. The floating point units have been extended to match Intel's 256-bit AVX units. However instead of having a 256-bit for every core it has 2x128-bits for every module that can be coupled to provide 256-bit only when needed.

And they're sacrificing on performance. In many cases, a quad core i5 or six core Thuban beat the eight core Piledriver in multithreaded performance.

Nope, if it has CISC instructions it's no longer RISC. SSE has complex instructions so it can't be termed RISC and even if it didn't it still part of the CISC instruction set and not a separate instruction set. A separate core with a RISC instruction set can be optimised for those instructions.

It's way too in depth to cover in a simple forum post, but SSE is very close in design to RISC. Maybe one day I'll do an article on it, but it won't be in the very near future, I have far too much on my plate right now.

Because of principles for one but you haven't actually shown that Intel gives you more bang for your back. I guess you also don't see the irony that it's because of our support for AMD that you have the privilege of paying Intel more for something that's faster.

Well actually if AMD didn't exist I'd still have the privilege of paying Intel for something that's faster... Or slower... Depends on how you look at it, but it would be the only choice

No you didn't prove the contrary. Your comparisons are based on CPUs only but as we've shown you don't buy just a processor but a whole computer and money wise an AMD rig offers more value than an Intel one.

I've shown that a second hand Intel motherboard AND CPU can be bought cheaper than the FX-8350 AND still beat it, and I've also shown that the i5-4690 and motherboard can be bought for the same price as an FX-8350 while proving significantly better performance - and I've also shown that you could get better performance in many games with a R 1,600 Core i3 processor. What else is there to a computer?

RAM
Graphics card
Hard drive/SSD
Optical drive
Sound card
Case
Power supply

All of which could be the exact same components regardless of which platform you choose. Where's this massive saving people are harking on about?

You can run socket LGA771 Xeon processors on LGA775 motherboards using a paper shim to cover up some pins, but that's neither here nor there. Neither Intel nor AMD officially supported these methods of getting chips to work on sockets they weren't really designed for.

Better than that (and I have dozens in my cupboard) is the slocket adapter which allowed you to use a Socket 370 CPU on a Slot 1 motherboard. All methods being discussed are unofficial, so I may as well throw that in.

Funny thing is I'm still running fine with my 3.2Ghz Phenom II.

Paired with a 7950 there's no game I can't run at 1920*1200.

You've just reinforced my point that people with a Core i7-920 don't need to upgrade to an i7-2600K followed by an i7-3770K followed by an i7-4790K

 

[Chevron]

You've just reinforced my point that people with a Core i7-920 don't need to upgrade to an i7-2600K followed by an i7-3770K followed by an i7-4790K

And there's nothing wrong with that.

We're both agreeing that a monster CPU isn't needed for gaming so no need to pay extra for Intel

 

[HideInLight]

The AMD saving is overseas, in South Africa the FX 8350 should of cost R2500 if the R/$ conversion would of worked out the same as with Intel in SA.

 

[Progenix Oj101]

And there's nothing wrong with that.

We're both agreeing that a monster CPU isn't needed for gaming so no need to pay extra for Intel

My point remains that you don't need to pay more, you can pay the same brand new or far less for something that is still cheaper second hand

 

[CataclysmZA]

The link had an extra forward slash, but I edited the post with an Anandtech link so it would be easier for you to understand.

Yay, the console APUs are similar to other APUs based on Kabini and Temash which are all based on some assortment of Jaguar CPU and GCN graphics cores! Hit the nail on the head, right there.

I don't think you're understanding what the term "semi-custom silicon" means in terms of the console agreements. Those are not standard Jaguar CPUs, those are not standard GCN cores inside those consoles. There are literally entire dedicated function units that were chopped out of the final design because they aren't needed.

I doubt Steamroller will come to AM3+ as it's too late already, but I haven't seen anything regarding excavator though and I've been looking. All I find are forum posts of people asking the question if/when excavator will be coming to AM3+.

Steamroller wont hit it, neither will Excavator. If there was any chance of this happening, this roadmap would be completely different. In fact, the more I learn about Carrizo, the more I'm inclined to believe that socket FM2+ will end with a bunch of Kaveri refresh chips.

Edit: But hey, they have been saying 2015 and FM2+ for almost a year now, so maybe they'll be the last hurrah.

 

[Swa]

You can run socket LGA771 Xeon processors on LGA775 motherboards using a paper shim to cover up some pins, but that's neither here nor there. Neither Intel nor AMD officially supported these methods of getting chips to work on sockets they weren't really designed for.

Also, accept that AM3+ is dead already. AMD has said as much in their roadmaps. Steamroller won't come to it, Excavator is certainly not going to arrive on it. Its dead, let it be.

AMD may not have officially designed Bulldozer chips to work with AM3 boards but nonetheless achieved it by not including the extra pin that was originally planned. It may have been intentional or not but it still puts them ahead of Intel. I don't know if you're implying an official BIOS upgrade to be comparable to a crude hack of applying a paper shim.

Actually AMD hasn't confirmed anything for AM3+. We know it won't be extended further but we have known for a while they would consolidate the two platforms into either the FM2+ or a new platform. There is still a gap in the market for performance Steamroller and Excavator CPUs on either AM3+ or FM2+ and it doesn't have to be in AMD's roadmap for them to take advantage of that.

Just because multiple technologies exist doesn't mean you can mash them together without R&D costs.

Oh boy, you have a serious misconception of what R&D is. But as I've shown the only thing that's actually different is the GDDR5 controller on the PS4 and the embedded eSRAM on the XBoxOne. The R&D to make these technologies work together was done 5 years ago when they were developed. Everything else is what you'll find in a standard APU.

I guess that makes the FirePro and Quadro rubbish cards cause they don't excel at gaming but beat their desktop counterparts in design? That's the exact comparison you're making.

You're still misrepresenting everything I say. I never claimed it's rubbish. I said performance sacrifice isn't something you pay an extra premium for. The FirePro and Quadro cards occupy the same price points as regular cards starting at R1500.

I used a second hand Intel to compare to AMD's finest as it is faster in every respect while costing significantly less. If you want to look at new prices, have a look at the Core i5-4690, it is R 200 cheaper than the FX-8350 (they're around R 2,700 give or take, you said the FX-8350 is R 2,900 so we'll go with your pricing - even though the same place selling the i5-4690 for the price mentioned is doing the FX-8530 for almost R 3,300 I'll go with your pricing to swing as much weight in AMD's favour as possible. I could indeed choose a cheaper Intel board, but I went with one that offered enough features for your average gamer - four DIMM slots, two PCIe slots, six SATA ports.

It makes no sense to compare second hand to new other than trying to stack the deck. Yes you went with a board that had enough features and for that you had to go R1200. But lets go for that. The H97 you chose doesn't support overclocking as the more expensive Z97 chipset does. The H97 is limited to 1600 ram speed. The MSI AMD 970 Gaming AM3plus supports ram speeds up to 1866 or 2133 overclocked and in addition is packed with rather a lot of features some of which are usually only available on +R2000 Intel boards. Guess with Intel to remain cost effective you simply have to skimp on the features AMD provides by default.

No, you're right, the CPUs aren't the same. I've found the Core i5-4690/K for less than I can find the FX-8350. Oops. You said R 1,000 for the AMD motherboard, I said sub R 1,200 for the Intel board, the differences even each other out and you're looking at the same price for vastly different performance.

A second hand special again?

Where's this second hand AMD that beats the Core i7-2600K for less money? R 2,000 for a P67 board and i7-2600K CPU is the normal selling price, a special would be when you can find something for the same price but with a 3770K. My whole point here is people are complaining that Intel offers poor value for money, I have shown that both a CPU/board combo that costs less than just the FX-8350 as well as a brand new Intel CPU for the same price as the FX-8350 beat the FX-8350 in gaming performance. In order for your argument to be valid I need you to show me a second hand AMD CPU/board combo that costs less than R 2,000 and beats the i7-2600K.

Rotflol, putting words into my mouth and taking things out of context again. I never claimed a second hand AMD would beat a Core i7 (who names a processor 'core' anyway?) in isolation. By combining it with a better gfx card that I would be able to afford if I happen to stumble upon one of these second hand specials it would however either beat your i7 or have pretty similar performance.

Netburst was a huge failure, Rambus was a good move at the time as it offered better performance than DDR, no market adoption = fail no matter how good something may be so 3DNow! was definitely a bit of a fail.

Slot 1 wasn't a fail either, it was needed to keep manufacturing costs down. I covered it in an article I did for TheOverclocker on the history of overclocking, see part 2 A Brief History of Overclocking II: A Multiplier-Unlocked Look at the Next 15 Years of Overclocking in issue 25, page 18:

RDRAM might have been better than regular DRAM at the time but technology is only half of what makes something good. This is evident with Betamax which lost to VHS despite being the better format that's still preferred for archival purposes. It can be argued that Intel's main motivation was the 1 million shares at $10 each that Rambus offered in exchange for making RDRAM the primary industry standard. If it panned out those shares would be worth quite a lot. Intel even made an investment in Micron Technologies of $500 million and paid $100 million to Samsung to make it happen. They didn't however pay off the large amount of Southeast-Asia guys that were making DRAM. They weren't keen on paying the huge royalties for a technology that was also expensive to manufacture. Intel actually needed RDRAM for it's Pentium 4 processors and for Netburst to be of benefit. What's more the performance benefits of RDRAM were unrealised with the Pentium 3 and even a previous generation Intel platform with SDRAM had better performance. The latencies of RDRAM were simply too high for where SDRAM and DDR was going.

3DNow wasn't a failure and several developers adopted it writing dual code for both AMD and Intel platforms. AMD never extended it though and allowed Intel to take the lead with SSE.

No matter how advanced Bulldozer is, if we can't make use of it during its lifetime what use is it? How can that be considered anything short of a failure? What matters right now is what we can do right now, and the simple truth is that Bulldozer and Piledriver are simply not keeping up.

LOLZ. Bulldozer introduced the tech. Piledriver fixed the performance issues. It will remain in future processors iterations and gain support or more appropriately optimisations. I guess by your standard Intel's PAE Pentium Pro was also a failure as its first support was 5 years later with Windows 2000 when servers had moved to different platforms.

And they're sacrificing on performance. In many cases, a quad core i5 or six core Thuban beat the eight core Piledriver in multithreaded performance.

No they aren't. The performance issues were fixed with Piledriver. With the module design and processes only utilising the resources they actually need they can include more cores to increase performance. Or they have the option to keep the count the same but reduce costs like they are with their APUs.

It's way too in depth to cover in a simple forum post, but SSE is very close in design to RISC. Maybe one day I'll do an article on it, but it won't be in the very near future, I have far too much on my plate right now.

Its very simple really. SSE is an extension to the x86 instruction set so it isn't RISC. It utilises some of the same architecture and has some CISC instructions.

I don't know why you're focusing on it in any case as the instructions are for specific use cases. A RISC based processor offers advantages for any process that doesn't need to use complex instructions.

Well actually if AMD didn't exist I'd still have the privilege of paying Intel for something that's faster... Or slower... Depends on how you look at it, but it would be the only choice

And being the only choice you would pay significantly more for it.

I've shown that a second hand Intel motherboard AND CPU can be bought cheaper than the FX-8350 AND still beat it, and I've also shown that the i5-4690 and motherboard can be bought for the same price as an FX-8350 while proving significantly better performance - and I've also shown that you could get better performance in many games with a R 1,600 Core i3 processor. What else is there to a computer?

RAM
Graphics card
Hard drive/SSD
Optical drive
Sound card
Case
Power supply

All of which could be the exact same components regardless of which platform you choose. Where's this massive saving people are harking on about?

See above.

 

[Swa]

The AMD saving is overseas, in South Africa the FX 8350 should of cost R2500 if the R/$ conversion would of worked out the same as with Intel in SA.

The CPU saving is mainly overseas for some reason. The motherboard saving is both overseas and in South Africa.

My point remains that you don't need to pay more, you can pay the same brand new or far less for something that is still cheaper second hand

The point still remains that if you go second hand Intel you can go second hand AMD.

 

[Shard]

That's a motherboard feature, not CPU feature. So blame gigabye/asus/msi whoever.

Did know that, was back when I was a noob. They just told me its because it was an AMD cpu. Cant remember which motherboard brand it was.

 

[Rudimental]

Did know that, was back when I was a noob. They just told me its because it was an AMD cpu. Cant remember which motherboard brand it was.

You were told correctly. There are two different ways to protect your chip from frying: automatic on-die CPU thermal protection and setting BIOS thermal cutoff temperatures. The former is the proper way, while the latter is less effective but more configurable. This was about 14 years ago, so I cannot remember if motherboards even had thermal cutoff options back then. BIOS settings were often obscured from end users, because they did not have the failsafes that we have today. So, you would usually have to hold down a certain combination of keys to get to the advanced settings like this if they did have them. I'm also not sure Thunderbird even had on-die temperature sensors at all, but instead had the CPU temp read by sensors on the motherboard itself, which would not give you accurate readings.

Automatic on-die CPU thermal protection has been in Intel chips since the 90's and AMD chips since, uh, well sometime after Thunderbird. I know it was in AMD chips by Athlon XP. I remember this, because I made sure to check before buying a 3200+.

 

[Progenix Oj101]

snip

I'm at work, so I'm going to make a very brief reply:

Compare the Quadro K6000 or a FirePro W9100 to a GeForce GTX 780 Ti, GeForce GTX 980, Radeon R9 295X, etc and see how poorly the "premium" graphics cards do with gaming? It's EXACTLY the same - call it "performance sacrificing" - oh the horror! Oh wait, not designed with gaming in mind. Oh snap.

It DOES make sense to compare second hand from one camp when it obliterates everything the other camp has to offer And if you want to overclock the i7-2600K or i5-4690/K you're going to reach levels that the FX-8350 can't hope to rival - running close to 5 GHz it can't keep up with the Intel processors in question at stock speed.

Both Takealot and others (eg Landmark) have the Core i5-4690 and i5-4690K for less than the FX-8350, so no, not a "second hand special."

Show me where Intel needs more than DDR3-1600 for gaming? I'm talking about where it can actually make a real world difference, don't throw AIDA64 benchmarks at me

A second hand AMD with board that is priced equal to a second hand Intel i7-2600K CPU with P67 board (R 2,000) is going to offer nowhere near the performance of the Intel, so why bother with it? Same price, worse performance. Where's this saving you're going to spend on the graphics card? You keep mentioning it, but I'm not seeing them.

AMD not pursuing 3DNow! is typical of AMD not taking advantage of situations wherever possible. Instead, they offered Intel the advantage of a silver platter.

Does anyone care about Physical Address Extensions in the Pentium Pro? No? Did anyone care than the Pentium Pro had it when we actually needed it? No, it was obsolete. Then why does it matter? Same for Bulldozer and Piledriver.

Again, a shared design (CMT) cannot always equal the performance of a multicore design. As soon as there is competition for the shared resources, there's a performance penalty.

 

[Progenix Oj101]

Core i5-4690 R 2,789 - not a second hand special

 

[HideInLight]

Core i5-4690 R 2,789 - not a second hand special

That's pretty good, thought prices are increasing though?
Nvm, see it's the non-k, normally a R200 price difference in those so normal.

 

[KleinBoontjie]

A friend of mine also bought himself a secondhand i7 Bloomfield, about 3 months back, on recommendation from one of our Intel crazy friends. He regretted it. He got it with DFI X58 Lanparty board, 6GB ram and a Nvidia Graphic card (the only new thing was the Graphic card). He's struggling to play Dead rising, Ryse and Dragons age Inquisition. So secondhand didn't work out for him.

In the same breath I can brag that my 7year old AMD Athlone 2 5800+, with Asus MB, Radeon 7850 could play these games with ease. I have upgraded a while bag to newer hardware and gave my old stuff to my daughter, who's enjoying it immensely.

 

[Progenix Oj101]

Back that up? I find it very hard to believe unless he bought a GeForce 520 or something. He has an immensely more powerful CPU than you, and your side doesn't make sense either. Your CPU doesn't meet the requirements for any of the three games, and your graphics card misses the mark for one of the games and only just makes the cut for another. DFI boards are also not known for their reliability or ease of use, they were made as enthusiast boards for chasing records. They can be both unstable and difficult to use - this is true of both their AMD and Intel platform boards.

Either he has a slow card, his PC isn't setup correctly, or there's something wrong with the story. I myself have a Bloomfield, Sandy Bridge and dual Westmere PC, all of which are used for gaming and all of which do fine CPU-wise.

Odd thing I noticed night before last, bf4.exe hits 40% CPU usage on my dual Westmere (24 threads) system when loading and then drops to around 7% in game. On the other two it hits 100% when loading and drop to around 30-40% in game. Odd that loading hits the CPU so hard.

 

[Rudimental]

A friend of mine also bought himself a secondhand i7 Bloomfield, about 3 months back, on recommendation from one of our Intel crazy friends. He regretted it. He got it with DFI X58 Lanparty board, 6GB ram and a Nvidia Graphic card (the only new thing was the Graphic card). He's struggling to play Dead rising, Ryse and Dragons age Inquisition. So secondhand didn't work out for him.

An i7 900 chip might still be okay if overclocked to 4.0+ Ghz, but that is going to depend on the stepping. The X58 platform is ancient, though, with no native SATA III support, only inferior Marvel controllers. It does have plenty of PCIE lanes for better modern controllers, but it may be hard to boot off a PCIE SATA card, depending on the MB. Overall, really not worth it unless it was amazingly cheap.

Bloomfield is also actually the forerunner to the chip in the op. In Nehalem, Bloomfield chips were performance desktop parts based on server architecture, but had no special designation (they were just the i7 900 series). Intel took the Lynnfield successors, smaller socket, and ran with that for the desktop segment and moved the Bloomfield successors into a new enthusiast 'E' category from Sandy Bridge onward.

 

[Progenix Oj101]

That is correct, LGA1366 was the previous HEDT platform.

 

[KleinBoontjie]

Back that up? I find it very hard to believe unless he bought a GeForce 520 or something. He has an immensely more powerful CPU than you, and your side doesn't make sense either. Your CPU doesn't meet the requirements for any of the three games, and your graphics card misses the mark for one of the games and only just makes the cut for another. DFI boards are also not known for their reliability or ease of use, they were made as enthusiast boards for chasing records. They can be both unstable and difficult to use - this is true of both their AMD and Intel platform boards.

Either he has a slow card, his PC isn't setup correctly, or there's something wrong with the story. I myself have a Bloomfield, Sandy Bridge and dual Westmere PC, all of which are used for gaming and all of which do fine CPU-wise.

Odd thing I noticed night before last, bf4.exe hits 40% CPU usage on my dual Westmere (24 threads) system when loading and then drops to around 7% in game. On the other two it hits 100% when loading and drop to around 30-40% in game. Odd that loading hits the CPU so hard.

It might be the Graphic card, he is going to buy a better one, we'll see then. He came to me last week for help. Can't remember the model of the card he has now.

What can I say, my older hardware played that games, on low settings, but it played. Might be my graphics and ram that pulled me through there. Either way, I'm on a FX 8320 now, with newer motherboard, same graphics, newer ram and the games I can now play on high settings.

 

[Progenix Oj101]

My first bet would be his graphics card. In all fairness, the 5800+ is comparable to a Core 2 Duo, so...

 

[HideInLight]

A friend of mine also bought himself a secondhand i7 Bloomfield, about 3 months back, on recommendation from one of our Intel crazy friends. He regretted it. He got it with DFI X58 Lanparty board, 6GB ram and a Nvidia Graphic card (the only new thing was the Graphic card). He's struggling to play Dead rising, Ryse and Dragons age Inquisition. So secondhand didn't work out for him.

In the same breath I can brag that my 7year old AMD Athlone 2 5800+, with Asus MB, Radeon 7850 could play these games with ease. I have upgraded a while bag to newer hardware and gave my old stuff to my daughter, who's enjoying it immensely.

Why would anyone in their right mind buy a 1st gen i7 3 months back.
Price must of been really cheap in order to justify it. It's gonna be terrible for the majority of games that only have duo core support, and barely keep up with a newer i3 duo core in a game supports all it's cores.

On the other end if it's an easy OC it's not totally irrelevant.

Also what Nvidia graphics card?