CrossFireX and the Phenom II X4 940 – Competitive or Not?
by Gary Key on February 2, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Left 4 Dead
This game is a blast and addictive to boot - provided you like killing hundreds of zombies while trying to take care of your teammates and sustaining high blood pressure rates. What we really like about Source engine games is their ability to run well on variety of systems. We enable all options, set AA to 2x and AF to 8x, and play back a custom timedemo of a complete game session from the Runway chapter within the Dead Air campaign.
This title also favors the Intel platforms. When comparing the Q9550 to the Phenom II 940 at 1680x1050 it holds a 7% average frame rate advantage in single card mode, 5% in Crossfire, and 20% in the overclocked settings even though the Q9550 only has a 7% clock speed advantage. Minimum frame rates for the Phenom II remain very competitive against the Q9550 until the processors are overclocked, but a 101fps minimum is still outstanding. The i7 continues to dominate the other two solutions in benchmark results.
Adding a second card for CrossFire operation improves average frame rates by 15% and minimum frame rates by 18% for the Phenom II. The Intel Q9550 has an improvement of 13% in average frame rates and 30% in minimum frame rates. The Core i7 average frame rates improve by 16% and minimum rates increase 31%. Overclocking our processors resulted in an 17%~34% average improvement in average frame rates with the Core i7 benefiting the most.
No surprises here; the 1920x1200 results follow the pattern set at 1680x1050. All three solutions bunch together in the single card results and then spread out as we introduce CrossFire and overclocking into our equation. The Q9550 holds a 10% advantage over the Phenom II in CrossFire and 26% when overclocked. Minimum frame rates continue to be very good for the Phenom II in single card and CrossFire operation.
The Q9550 scores slightly better than the i7 in the single card and CrossFire mode as its 6% advantage in clock speeds (or perhaps the larger L2 cache) comes into play as we start to become more GPU limited at this resolution. The Phenom II has a 6% clock speed advantage over the Q9550 and a 12% advantage over the i7 that leads us to believe platform efficiency is a problem or the game engine optimizations favor Intel. We believe it is a combination of both.
Adding a second card for CrossFire operation improves average frame rates by 13% and minimum frame rates by 42% for the Phenom II. The Intel Q9550 has an improvement of 24% in average frame rates and 40% in minimum frame rates. The Core i7 average frame rates improve by 24% and minimum rates increase 48%. Overclocking our processors resulted in a 16%~34% average improvement in average frame rates with the Core i7 benefiting the greatest.
Our game play experiences revealed no differences between the three platforms. Although the frame rates were lower with the Phenom II, it just did not matter in this game as minimum frame rates were at 60fps or higher in our tests.
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FingerMeElmo87 - Monday, February 2, 2009 - link
"Seriously, who cares for Crossfire (or SLI)?Please. Stop making those useless enthusiast's enthusiast reviews and come back to the ground, AnandTech."
--Whats down to earth? Intel Celeries and IGPs'? They did both average use benches with single GPU and enthusiast class benches with dual GPUs and overclocking. how could you get your panties in a bunch like so easily. did you even bother to read the article?
"Please, go ahead, check the Steam survey hardware list.
Then tell me: How many people out of 100 do have SLI/Crossfire.
Then laugh.
Then stop testing this shit like it was important."
--Once again, same worthless comment. they didnt just test crossfire
"And here my suggestions for constructive improvement:
Test the new generation of HDDs with 500GB platters (e.g. Seagate 7200.12 series)
THAT would be interesting, because EVERYONE needs a good HDD, but no one needs Crossfire."
--ugh. saying eveyone needs the latest and greatest type of harddrive is like saying everyone needs crossfire and SLI.
going as far as breaking down your entire retarded post was a complete waste of time just to call you a douche bag but i guess it had to be done
CPUGuy - Monday, February 2, 2009 - link
The user "Finally" is right (although a tad abrasive). You don't need CF or SLI to run any of those games at an acceptable frame rate. Furthermore, the mainstream crowd does outnumber the enthusiast crowd using CF/SLI by many fold. So it would have made more beneficial to show both CPU stock and overclock results using just a 4870.Heck, they could have added a PII 920 at stock and overclock and a 4850 just to make it interesting. Maybe one day we will see such a setup tested.
scottb75 - Wednesday, February 4, 2009 - link
With SLI/CF the CPU becomes more of the bottleneck then it would be with just one GPU. So, testing with SLI/CF shows more of a difference between the CPUs then it would with just a single card.Gary Key - Monday, February 2, 2009 - link
This is not a GPU comparison per say, it is a platform comparison. We set the game options to a blended mixture of quality and performance in order to keep the GPU setup from becoming the limiting factor when possible. This is explained in further detail in page two.CPUGuy - Monday, February 2, 2009 - link
Although I understand your reasoning and to a degree it make sense. However, many are using or attempting to use 4xAA max settings at 1680 (at the very least). Therefore, it would be very informative to many of use what we could expect.This is with the expectation that we are no longer worried about just CPU scores but platform scores. IMO, reviewers should start looking at the platform as whole in reviews like this as many are looking at it that way. If it were true that one motherboard performed exceedingly better then another a CPU only benchmark would make sense.
CPUGuy - Monday, February 2, 2009 - link
us not use...sorryv1001 - Sunday, February 1, 2009 - link
Page 10 - Final Words is missingGary Key - Monday, February 2, 2009 - link
The article went live before it was completed. Page 10 is in and I will update it late tomorrow with power consumption numbers. Just finishing the power tests on the i7 with the same power supply we use on the other setups.