Conclusion

As you can see from those results, the processor doesn't matter at all when it comes to graphics card limited games/benchmarks. But then when the graphics card is not the bottleneck we notice big differences. A closer look at the synthetic benchmarks shows that there is only one processor benchmark where the CPUs performance comes into the game. In fact it is 3DMark Vantage where you can see a huge difference between the Core i7-3770K and the FX-4170. Otherwise there is almost no difference at all, for 3DMark11 the score was 0.1 % different, in TessMark only 0.6 % and under Unigine Heaven the difference was a tiny little bit higher with 1.27 % over the AMD processor.

Shifting the focus to games there is also a noticeable increase in performance in some cases and nothing at all - or very few - in other cases. In our performance rating we saw that the Core i7-3770K was almost 23 percent faster than the FX-4170 on average. With 1 percent there is almost no advantage for the Intel CPU in Alien vs Predator. In Crysis 2 you can see that the FX-4170 is about 3 percent behind. Then comes BattleField 3, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Dragon Age II where Intel is leading by 6 percent for the first two and 8 percent for the last one. But now there are the big numbers with games such as Batman: Arkham City, DIRT 2, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, StarCraft II and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that seems to be well optimised for a higher thread count. So it's Intel's playground here as Intel's processor has got 4 cores and 8 threads while AMD's processor got 2 modules with a total of 4 so called cores. Going to the results now you can see a gap of 20 % between the two processors under Batman, 30 % under both DIRT 2 and Call of Duty, 56 % for Skyrim and finally a huge 70 % under StarCraft II (such strategy game benefits more from a processor upgrade than a very high end graphics card).

Not much to say regarding the power consumption where the i7 3770K was 10 Watts more efficient in idle and 20 Watts under load. Now if we take a look at the performance/price ratio it is interesting to see that for a processor that brings only 1.23 times the performance of the FX-4170 under games you will have to pay 2.3 times as much. Therefore you find a performance/price which is twice as bad as the FX-4170's one on the i7 3770K.

Next time we are going to test the FX-8150 vs i7 3770K, stay tuned!