Conclusion

Last summer we published a similar series of articles, where we were analyzing gaming performance on the basis of two different processors. Back in the days it became very clear that performance differences between two CPU's at high resolutions are close to zero. The reason for this can be found within the fact, that the processor isn't the bottleneck of a system, when you're playing games at high resolutions. In this case it's the graphics card, which has to work overtime. In case of lower resolutions the influence of the processor becomes clearly visible, since the graphics card isn't the limiting factor anymore.

Having a closer look at the results we gathered while testing eight different games and two benchmarks with a low and a high quality preset, we see that the Core i5-4670K, with our "low-preset" is on average 39.2 percent faster than the AMD FX-4350. Switching to our "high-preset" shows that the Core i5-4670K's can maintain it's lead with 8.9 percent advantage. Overclocking the AMD FX-4350 to 4.5 GHz makes the performance with our "low-preset" go up by 4.6 percent but when it comes to the high-preset the increase in performance is only 1.7 percent. Regarding the Core i5-4670K the situation is similar (10.9 percent "low-preset", 1.0 percent "high-preset"). What's quite interesting to see is how the wattage of our test system increased while maintaining 4.5 GHz stably. The FX-4350 needed 35.9 percent more power and in case of the 4670K the increase was a whopping 47 percent.

Last but not least, there is the price of these two processors. These days you can buy an AMD FX-4350 for 105 Euro whereas the Intel Core i5-4670K sets you back 195 Euro, which is roughly 90 percent difference. This gap cannot be justified by the performance plus you get from the Intel CPU. If your target is to build a gaming PC on a tight budget, then the AMD FX-4350 is going to be a good choice, especially since CPU performance is not going to have a huge impact when playing at high resolutions, since in this case the VGA will be the limiting factor in your system.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 9 - Far Cry 3
Page 2 - Test Setup	Page 10 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 3 - 3DMark Fire Strike	Page 11 - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Page 4 - Unigine Heaven 4.0	Page 12 - Metro: Last Light
Page 5 - BattleField 3	Page 13 - Power Consumption
Page 6 - Bioshock Infinite	Page 14 - Performance Index
Page 7 - Crysis 3	Page 15 - Conclusion
Page 8 - Call of Duty Black Ops 2