We were hoping to run the Shogun 2 CPU benchmark too in order to see how things stood on a more modern engine. The two AMD CPUs behaved much the same, while the Sandy Bridge chips were well over a third faster. We ran the benchmark at the lowest resolution and lowest graphical fidelity, while retaining CPU-heavy operations such as physics, just to make sure the CPU was taking the load. World in Conflict is a great CPU benchmark in gaming terms as different CPU hardware genuinely can show a difference. Take the GPU out of the equation however and things get more interesting. As long as the chip's not getting in the way then the GPU can operate with impunity. On the whole at the high end of the graphics spectrum, at the high resolutions, it's all about the graphics hardware. The gaming benchmarks are similarly telling. AMD FX-8150 (Black AMD FX) at Amazon for $799.Even the ageing Phenom II cores run faster than this brand new Bulldozer core.Īnd the two Sandy Bridge chips demonstrate just what an advantage their cores have over the AMD processors. Using the single-threaded Cinebench R10 benchmark you can immediately see the problems the FX-8150 faces. Unfortunately the actual cores in the Bulldozer modules look like the weak link in the multi-threaded chain.Ī quick check on the single-threaded performance of the FX-8150 highlights that weakness. Even at stock speeds the FX-8150 actually starts clawing back some ground on the i7 2600K, beating the quad-core i5 2500K easily as it does. Still, those extra threads come into account with the X264 video encoding benchmark. The eight-threaded Core i7 2600K however is streets ahead of all three. Yet that older brother still manages to put up a score of 5.88. That's a full six-core CPU, but is running on the older 45nm hardware and at a slower clockspeed too.

Amd fx 8150 review