Conclusion

As you can see from those results, the Intel Core2Duo is still up to date if you compare it to the FX-4170/FX-8150 from AMD. Okay in some games like Batman, DIRT2 and BattleField 3, the AMD FXs are 20 % faster than the Core2Duo and even 30 % under Call of Duty and Crysis 2. But still on average the gap between the FXs and the Core2Duo is only 13 %. Which is not bad at all since the E8400 is four years old, has only two cores clocked at 3.0 GHz. Why the Core2Duo is not far away behind the FX-8150 for example? There are several reasons but the main ones are the following:
- Today's games are still not optimized for multicore processors.
- AMD's FX architecture result in serious lacks of performance.

Now if you compare the E8400 to the i7 3770K you see a serious gap performancewise. But hey, this is another league. Anyway the results are in and here is what we see:
- You don't see any performance improvement going for the Core2Duo to the Core i7 in Alien vs Predator and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
- The gap is only 10 % under Dragon Age II.
- The Core i7 is faster by 30 % under both Batman/Crysis 2 and 25 % under BattleField 3.
- Now comes the big numbers: The Core i7 is 40 % faster under DIRT2/Skyrim and 45 % under StarCraft II/Call of Duty.

Conclusion: the Core2Duo still has some balls especially if you take a look at the performance/price ratio where we see that the E8400 is just inbetween AMD's FXs. For the record, using the comparison tool Geizhals.at, in EU the C2D E8400 is priced at 140€, the FX-4170 and FX-8150 offers start at 116 and 175€ and finally the big boy is worth 300€.
So if your budget is limited for an upgrade, I would say stay with your lovely Core2Duo and put some more bucks on the graphics card. In the case you have an okay budget then you can go for the FX-4170 which has the best performance/price ratio at the moment in our charts. Now if you are rich and want the absolute performance then go for the expensive Core i7 3770K.

Anyway stay tuned as I said in our previous article the following CPUs are to follow: Intel Core i7 920
Intel Core i7 920 @ 4 GHz
Intel Core i5 2500K
Intel Core2Quad Q6600
Intel Core i3 Ivy Bridge
AMD Phenom II x6 1090T BE
AMD Phenom II x4 970

Hey guys, which fight do you want to see next time? Feel free to leave a comment!