quote:

Originally posted by Sirrith:
Twice the price? Where are you getting your prices from?

the Q6600 costs $195 on newegg, and the 9850 costs $235.

Please note I have nothing against AMD. Heck, I like them. I'm just pointing out facts.

Actually more than twice the price if you're comparing Intel's top of the line quad to AMD's $1,000 plus bucks to $230. Yeah it's faster but not THAT much faster...

Da Worfster

but I wasnt suggesting that he get intel's top of the line...
I was suggesting either the e8400 or the Q6600. Both of which are priced very closely to AMD's offerings.

And building it yourself isnt too hard, milktaras you just need to make sure all the wires go in the right place (its usually quite obvious due to the shape or the the labelling on the connectors themselves.)

Just be careful not to damage anything when putting it all together.

I had built a rig for a m8 here that consisted of an e8400, 2GB DDR-2 RAM, an X1950XTX graphics card, a WD Raptor hard drive, X-Fi sound card, and all of this on an X38 chipset mobo from Foxconn.

Right beside of it was my personal rig consisting of an Opteron 185 oc'd to 3.2GHz, 2GB memory, an X1950XTX graphics card, two WD800JD hard drives in a Raid 0 array, an X-Fi sound card, and all of this on a DFI Lanparty UT CFX-3200 mobo.

Now what I am comparing here are two things. First there isn't hardly any performance difference (if any) between the 939-pin cpu's and the AM2 cpu's. So I am thinking that my Opteron 185 oc'd to 3.2GHz should perform closely to an AM2 6400+ cpu given the 6400+ is also clocked at 3.2GHz. Secondly that the e8400 is clocked at 3.0GHz and my Opteron 185 is clocked at 3.2GHz. So one would think that my Opteron may have an edge because of faster clock speeds. Now I know architecture or make up of an e8400 and an Opteron 185 are totally different so it may not be fair or feasible for me to even bring up the fact that both cpu's are clocked closely together. (What really makes me second guess even bringing this up is the lop sided results I will share with you in a moment). Plus we have the fact that the Intel rig and my rig are running identical graphics cards in the X1950XTX.

Now I am putting out there that the AM2 6400+ and my Opteron 185 should have close to the same performance numbers. I truly do not feel I am wrong for believing this and this is mainly because there isn't any performance differences between the 939-pin platform and the AM2 platform. I have read many, many reviews that have said exactly this. These reviews also came with bench\test results that bore out this statement to be true.

With all of the above said, I proceded to bench both rigs using the Black Death track. Using identical settings the Intel rig with the e8400 averaged 84.6 fps. My rig averaged 54.7 fps. Minimum frame rates for the Intel rig was 33 fps. Minimum frame rates for my rig was 24 fps.

Bottomline imho, and speaking only of this game\sim, an Intel build is the way to go. And the e8400 fits nicely into a budget build.

Now the 6400+ may very well perform better in some games than the e8400. I do not know. Personally though, given these results, I really do not believe it would.

And yea, you probably would get by cheaper building and AMD rig, but not by enough to even consider the loss of performance. I figured it up once not long ago putting components together for an AMD build and then doing the same for an Intel build, both using dual cores, the same graphics card, the same memory, the same sound cards, and the same hard drives. Everything identical except for the motherboards and the chipsets associated with those motherboards. The difference was around $80 more for the Intel build. Most of that was the price difference in the motherboards. Now I could have went with an older chipset and got the Intel motherboard much cheaper. But I am not one to go with anything less than the best. And imho, it was worth the extra $80 for the performance increase.

Think the difrence is more because of the fact this game runs OpenGL, think if you run that test in DX9 you get a verry difrent result.

The Intels run OpenGL games better but with DX9 and DX10 you get a difrent picture where the AMD's perform a lot better.

All my other games are DirectX, and as long as IL2 runs perfectly smooth with out stutters or extremly low FPS im happy.

bit-tech.net shows the 6400+ as having better performance in memory tests, but it shows it being beaten by 5-10 fps in Crysis by the e8400 (low-high res)
and by 6-20fps in WiC (low-high res). The Q6600 also beats the 6400+ in both the games.

Im not sure if bit-tech is a trusted review site, though they don't seem biased.

Like i said in some games the E8400 will be better than the X2 6400+

What you do need to watch out for with game benchmarks is that they need to use Motherboards that are compairable to each other, (same brand, chipset and type/class) and a lot of times they dont do that wich gives unfair results.