Conclusion

As you can see from those results, the processor doesn't matter at all when it comes to graphics card limited games/benchmarks. But then when the graphics card is not the bottleneck we notice big differences. A closer look at the synthetic benchmarks shows that there is only one processor benchmark where the CPUs performance comes into the game. In fact it is 3DMark Vantage where you can see a huge difference between the Core i7-3770K and the FX-4170/FX-8150. Thread count didn't matter as both processors have a total of eight, so either Intel's processor is well optimized or 3DMark Vantage is an Intel Benchmark. Otherwise there is almost no difference at all, for 3DMark11 the score was 0.7 % different, under Unigine Heaven the difference was 0.5 % for the FX-8150 over the Intel processor.

Shifting the focus to games there is also a noticeable increase in performance in some cases and nothing at all - or very little - in other cases. In our performance rating we saw that the Core i7-3770K was almost 23 percent faster than the FX-8150 on average. With 0.73 percent there is almost no advantage for the Intel CPU in Alien vs Predator. In Crysis 2 you can see that the FX-8150 is about 2 percent behind. Then comes BattleField 3, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Dragon Age II where Intel is leading by 6 percent for the first two and 8 percent for the last one. But now there are the big numbers with games such as Batman: Arkham City, DIRT 2, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, StarCraft II and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that seems to be well optimised for Intel. Both processors having the same thread count and the same woking frequency will all cores under load then this bigdifference is explained by a very efficient processor architecture or a well optimized game for it. Going to the results now you can see a gap of 17.6 % between the two processors under Batman, 15 % under DIRT 2, 30 % for Call of Duty, 60 % for Skyrim and finally a huge 84 % under StarCraft II (such strategy game benefits more from a processor upgrade than a very high end graphics card).

Not much to say regarding the power consumption where the i7 3770K was 15 Watts more efficient in idle and 30 Watts under GPU load (only one processor thread is being used at 100 %). Now if we take a look at the performance/price ratio it is interesting to see that for a processor that brings only 1.23 times the performance of the FX-8150 under games you will have to pay 1.62 times as much. Due to very few optimized games for more than two/four threads (which means games will scale more with the processor frequency and not the amount of cores/threads) the difference in performance between the FX-8150 and the FX-4170 is 0.7 %. Is it worth 1.42x the price? We don't think so! Therefore the performance/price of the FX-8150 is very bad and very good for the FX-4170. Intel's i7 3770K's performance/price stays the worse at the moment.

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