SLI Tests: Intel Sandy Bridge vs AMD Phenom II

[RSS_Poster]

AMD's new 990FX chipset natively supports SLI, so we decided to test its impact in games. Keep reading for more.


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[ET3D]

I'm impressed by the Lucid results. When I worked there the results weren't that great, and while it still loses to SLI on most occasions it's often not by much and sometimes it wins.

[PP Mguire]

As usual, Intel rapes. Glad to see B3D admits that AMD is holding system performance back quite a bit.

[James86]

I'm just glad to see SLI on AMD

[PP Mguire]

SLI has always been on AMD.

[Cody_Irwin]

It has to be intel all the way, Amd is for the poor like me, but I put out for intel like I should =)

[ET3D]

Intel is dominating in games across all price points right now. I just read a review at Xbit labs of the new Pentiums, and while there are still applications where the AMD low end CPUs win due to more cores, they lose soundly at gaming.

[Victor]

AMD is still more than capable of mainstream gaming. Looking at our single card performance, it's still quite comparable to Intel. It's only when it comes to extreme gaming, Intel wins.

It's all about finding the right combination of components. It would not makes sense if you put a low end card like hd 6500 with Phenom II x4 980 and expect to have a great result. And at the same time, you can expect that running dual high end card will give you a great performance if you are using an old CPU like athlon 64. Also, keep in mind that even for a single card at 1920 resolution, either amd or intel would be good as long as your gpu is capable. Since 1920 is the common resolution, I would say choose whatever your budget fits.

[Blacksmith1]

when it comes to over all performance for the $ I have been in the AMD camp for cpu and Nvida camp for gpu for many years. I don't see that changing in the near future due to my being on the edge of broke every time I need a repair or upgrade. I don't buy high end cause i can't afford it.

[PP Mguire]

AMD is still more than capable of mainstream gaming. Looking at our single card performance, it's still quite comparable to Intel. It's only when it comes to extreme gaming, Intel wins.

It's all about finding the right combination of components. It would not makes sense if you put a low end card like hd 6500 with Phenom II x4 980 and expect to have a great result. And at the same time, you can expect that running dual high end card will give you a great performance if you are using an old CPU like athlon 64. Also, keep in mind that even for a single card at 1920 resolution, either amd or intel would be good as long as your gpu is capable. Since 1920 is the common resolution, I would say choose whatever your budget fits.

Not to mention it's retarded to buy anything more than a 955 anyways =D

Since 955-980 are all essentially the same chip.

I went with Intel for obvious reasons. I like it when anything I do has a noticeable speed difference between processors.