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 different benchmarks with two different presets, we see that the Intel Core i7-4770K, with our "low-preset" is on average 46.7 percent faster than the AMD A10-6800K. Switching to our "high-preset" makes the Intel Core i7-4770K's become 9.4 percent quicker than the AMD A10-6800K. Overclocking the Intel Core i7-4770K to 4.5 GHz makes the performance with our "low-preset" go up by 11 percent but when it comes to the high-preset the increase in performance is only 1 percent. Regarding the AMD A10-6800K the situation is similar: 1.4 percent gain with "low-preset" and 0.04 percent with "high-preset". What's quite interesting to see is how the wattage of our test system increased while maintaining 4.5 GHz stably. The 4770K needed 40 percent more power and in case of the 6800K we had to notice, that the CPU had been throttling and this despite the fact, that we were using a powerful aircooler - Phanteks PH-TC14PE.

At this point we want to go back to the question we were asking at the beginning of this review. By how much is a system, that's been equipped with an Intel Core i7-4770K faster than the same setup with an AMD A10-6800K, when playing demanding, recent games at high resolutions. In short: not even 10 percent. So basically for an additional ten percent you spend quite some additional money on the CPU as well as on the GPU. This once again shows, that if you have a limited budget and you want to assemble a decent gaming rig, then don't waste money on the CPU, put almost everthing you have in the graphics card.

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