Mitch?
banned
I wouldn't say they whip them at all. And at the price I would hardly go near the terms. Both of these exhibit an i7 maxed at 3.8ghz and a PII 940 at 2.64ghz. Videocard was the same 4870 X2.
Here's some farcry 2 benches -
Graph I: The first test shows i7 12% over PII, while at lower resolutions a 38% gain.
Graph II: i7 has a 12% gain, and then at lower (though still 1920x1200) resolution it has 25% gain.
However, here we see that both processors are more than able to handle games, where the GPU is the most processed. The Phenom II 940 actually BESTS the i7 by slight percents.
By the time our processors catch up to the 4870 x2 we'll have the 4890 to contend with, and so on until forever. If you're going to stress your graphics to the max, neither chip will make a difference, because they both are sufficient to fuel the super highend graphics card.
The AMD build cost $1300 and the Intel cost $1550, though they used a lower-end x58 board pricewise, and a bit costlier 790gx board, so the price will be a bit bigger difference.
So you'll be spending an extra near $300 for performance gains that have little real life noticeability. It's also noted that 1) Average i7 920 overclocks are anywhere from 3.5 stable to 4.0, while the PII 940 in this test (2.64ghz) was under clocked, as averages reach from 3.6 to 4.0 also.
The big deal on AMD right now is this - you have an Am2+ board and DDR2 ram already, instead of spending $400 off the bat , spend $150 on a cpu, spend money on ram and mobo later.
