Same rate? What are you smoking?
Consumes more power? Intel consumes less power and pwns AMD across the board on everything.
You are delusional.
Looks pretty damn lopsided to me, sometimes taking less than half the time to do a task-
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/363?vs=83
I'll make the comment I've made many times before, unless you've tried it you can't critisize it. If you've never owned sandy bridge, you have no a clue what you are missing. EVERYTHING is faster, down to the milliseconds that actually make a difference like things like opening an internet window and loading to the home page. With AMD, even with a hex core at 4ghz which I've owned, and even with the same SSD I have now, there's a slight delay. With intel, it's instant. Like I said, milliseconds of difference but it's just one example of hundreds. Maps load faster on intel with games as well.
And so what if you don't do these things everyday! If I compress a 300mb file I'd rather it take 1 minute instead of 2.
So, if you don't care about waiting those extra few seconds or minutes to do stuff, good for you. But they all add up. But don't for one second think that your mighty 3 core AMD does everything ''at the same rate'' as a sandy bridge quad. Thats just nonsense and like I said, delusional.
Because my 720 + 560Ti consumes more power than a 2600k @ 5.1 and 3 GTX 580's? If I had quoted your system, you would have a point, but guess what, I didn't.
I don't own, never have owned a SandyBridge chip, that isn't to say I haven't built systems with them or used them and they are very nice, yes, but no difference in performance. Spending ~£150 for a CPU + Mobo rather than doubling that and getting the same performance, or even a second here and there, isn't worth it at all. If I was on a £150 a second wage, I would take it, but no.
And you want to know how often I ever compress or decompress files? Maybe once or twice a month, tops. That is 1 minute out of 44640 saved for that month. I can see the appeal now.
You are speaking as though you are the only person who has ever graced the planet to use the systems you talk about when no, you aren't. I'm not pulling stuff out of the other end, quoting benches, saying what other people have said, I am talking from experience. For (Let me make this bit clearer for you)
MY USES, the system I have performs as well as one that costs twice as much.
Sitting here playing CoD4, MW2, MW3, WaW, BF2, BF3, Skyrim, Portal, TF, Fifa, Empire, Rome & Shogun Total War, CoH, L4D, SC2, LoL, HoN, all of them, max settings, full AA, highest res my monitor will run, 60+fps. So you know what, you can quote stuff as much as you like, you saying "Spend twice as much, you will save 2 seconds here and there!!" is what is delusional. So what you say that on paper they are faster, irl, no difference at all, and this is me using systems running 2600k's + 2 580's compared to my humble 720 + 560Ti.
You want to get down to it, fine, feel better because your system will do better than mine when you are looking at numbers, but I would rather use my computer than look at numbers on a synthetic benchmark. What you said about load times, well that too is just dandy, you get to sit there waiting for the map on a game to start whilst I wait for it to load, and still get in before the game actually starts. Let's go back to the car analogy, you can spend an extra 200k on a car that has a top speed of 200MPH, but when will you be able to actually use that on the roads?
If on single player, I don't play enough SP games for it to be an issue and even then you are talking an absolute max of 15-20 secs load time in every game. Bare in mind too that 99% of games have cutscenes during the load sequence, so that still isn't any time lost. If you load in in 10 seconds, but have a minute of cutscenes and I load in in 30, I still have that 30 seconds of cutscene to watch.
Let us sumarise then:
1. No game performance
2. No load performance for games,because you too have to wait
3. No significant performance outside of games (1-2 seconds is not enough given the extra cost)
4. Lower benchmark scores, but who the hell cares unless you are having an epeen measuring contest?
I'm out of this thread now because it is obvious that things aren't quite sinking in that there is a difference between people's uses and that my uses are different to yours and that my system will do every single thing to perfection as well as yours does. Yes, I will continue to upgrade as games and programs get more demanding, but I am not going to spend over the odds to see not a single bit of performance gain
