Test Systems and Procedures
Before we delve into any testing we would like to take this opportunity to review our test system and thank those sponsors who kindly provided us with test equipment to make our work possible. We offer our thanks to:
AMD for supplying us with an FX-8350 processor, which we reviewed here, the FX-4100 processor, which we reviewed here, and the 8GB 1866MHz AMD Radeon Memory Performance Series kit.
Kingston for supplying us with a Hyper X 3K 240GB solid state drive, which we reviewed here.
XFX for supplying us with an R9 290X Double Dissipation 4GB graphics card, which we reviewed here.
Corsair for supplying us with a Hydro Series H100i liquid CPU cooler, which we reviewed here.
Be Quiet for supplying us with a Straight Power E9 680W power supply unit, which we reviewed here.
ASUS for supplying us with a Crosshair V Formula 990FX AM3+ motherboard, which we reviewed here.
Lian Li for supplying us with a PC-T60A test bench.
Noctua for supplying us with NT-H1 thermal compound.
Test System:
- Motherboard – Asus Crosshair V Formula 990FX AM3+ Motherboard
- Processor – AMD FX-8350 and FX-4100, both stock with Turbo enabled
- Graphics Card: XFX R9 290X Double Dissipation 4GB with AMD Catalyst 14.6 RC2 drivers
- RAM – 8GB (2 X 4GB) AMD Radeon Memory Performance Series 9-10-9-27 1866MHz
- CPU Cooler – Corsair H100i with Quiet Fan Profile
- Power Supply – Be Quiet Straight Power E9 680W
- Main Storage Drive – Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD
- Chassis – Lian Li T60 Test Bench
- Displays – LG IPS234 23 inch 1080p display
- Operating System – Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit
Games Used
- Battlefield 4
- Plants vs Zombies
- Thief
Resolution(s) Used
- 1920 x 1080
How about with core i3 or Pentium Anniversary edition with mantle? i wonder how much gain they can get…
well you will get a small performance boost, but mantle is most efficent with AMD gear. I remember i saw some video (linustechtips) where they compared AMD some 4k or something APU series and a R9 2xx and some intel i7 i think it was with a r9 2xx and the AMD combo was significantly better
Yes its about overcoming CPU bottlenecks so AMD CPUs always gain the most as they always perform worse so there is more bottleneck to be removed by Mantle.
core i3 and pentium anniversary is intel low-mid end offering so i just wonder if the gain will be enough to close the gap against core i7. given im still running core i3-530, how much of gain is what im trying to find out but most review out there prefer to compare a10 apu and core i7…
Well we do not have either of those CPUs but we will expand testing to include the anniversary edition CPU when AMD add more Mantle games later on. I’d presume the pentium anniversary would make a 10-15% gain. On your i3 530 which is clarkdale and fairly old I’d say you’ll see similar gains to the FX 8350: 20-30%.
not likely. even with cpu bottleneck removed, AMD cpu’s are still behind by about 2 cores to 1 margin. I know AMD loves to pull the card that their competitor is doing things to make games run worse on their hardware. So could the test be setup to run worse on intel chips?
Without Intel CPUs this article is not so much. We all know AMD CPUs cause bottleneck. Lets see some amd and intel comp.
I agree, AMD cpu’s being slower per core means more likely to be the bottle neck using directx.
bottleneck my dick i can play BF3 on ultra @ 60fps on my 7850k
Also dont forget to test mantle with 2 gb amd vga card.
Huh, funny thing with theif test, my 4770k at stock clocks and a gtx780 avg’s almost 70fps using directx. Yet an 8350 + 290x using mantle is 15% slower. yes using very high settings as well.