Conclusion

Default

First of all we’re going to have a closer look at performance differences with standard clock speeds. From our overall performance rating we see that the Core i5-6600K is on average 14.39 % quicker than the AMD FX-8320. If we start searching for the benchmarks with best possible scaling on the i5-6600K, then we find Excel running 409.50% faster on this CPU and Photoshop benefitting by 46.76%. Both these applications appear to be highly optimized towards Intels current architecture. Therefore it's very interesting to see that the AMD CPU is actually capable to putting it's eight cores to good use in WinRAR performing 57.98% faster than the i5-6600K.
We also had a closer look at power consumption and in idle we notice that our test setup with Core i5-6600K was burning 54.35% less power than the same system equipped with AMD FX-8320. In case of load power consumption the difference is absolutely drastic with the Core i5-6600K using 224.41% less energy. Apparently the reason for that is that the much smaller 14nm manufacturing process with the Intel CPU simply plays in another league when it comes to power consumption.

4.2 GHz

Overclocking the Core i5-6600K increases the average performance by 8.84%, while the FX-8320 benefits by 14.16%.
A closer look at power consumption reveals that overclocking these CPUs makes for quite a difference in certain cases. With the Core i5-6600K we see system power consumption go up by 4.35% in idle and 6.30% under load, when comparing with default power consumption values. In the case of the AMD FX-8320 system power consumption goes up by 60.56% in idle and 5.34% under full load.

Recommendation

Comparing these two processors is definitely not an easy task. As we learnt from the test results the application can account for huge performance differences. As we mentioned the i5-6600K benefits massively in Excel, while the FX-8320 can show its muscles running WinRAR. Therefore looking at our performance index only tells half the story and in the case of comparing recent Intel with AMD FX processors we strongly recommend you to study the sepcific test results and ask yourself what applications you're going to run on your system most.

In the end there are two things which are rather clear: power consumption and price. In terms of what the two test systems were pulling from the wall the new Intel platform is simply in another league, which is obvious considering the much smaller manufacturing process. That process technology allows for massively increased energy efficiency. The second thing, that might not cause too much discussion is pricing. These days an Intel Core i5-6600K costs about 239 Euro, while the FX-8320 sells at 139 Euro. Apart from that the entire AMD platform is cheaper than the Intel platform. Usually we'd now write that the for XY% more performance with the Core i5-6600K you'd have to pay XYZ% premium. In the case of these two processors we will not do this because that does not take energy efficiency into account. Nevertheless if you're on a really tight budget then a platform based on the FX-8320 can be a reasonable choice.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 8 - WinRAR / 7-Zip
Page 2 - PCMark	Page 9 - Frybench
Page 3 - 3DMark	Page 10 - HandBrake
Page 4 - Microsoft Excel	Page 11 - Photoshop
Page 5 - Cinebench	Page 12 - Performance Rating
Page 6 - SiSoft Sandra	Page 13 - Power Consumption
Page 7 - Blackhole	Page 14 - Conclusion