Conclusion

Last summer we published a similar series of articles, where we were analyzing gaming performance on the basis of two different processors. Back in the days it became very clear that performance differences between two CPU's at high resolutions are close to zero. The reason for this can be found within the fact, that the processor isn't the bottleneck of a system, when you're playing games at high resolutions. In this case it's the graphics card, which has to work overtime. In case of lower resolutions the influence of the processor becomes clearly visible, since the graphics card isn't the limiting factor anymore.

Having a closer look at the results we gathered while testing eight different games and two different benchmarks with two different presets, we see that the Intel Core i5-2500K, with our "low-preset" is on average 37.9 percent faster than the AMD A10-6800K. Switching to our "high-preset" makes the Intel Core i5-2500K's become 7.9 percent quicker than the AMD A10-6800K. Overclocking the Intel Core i5-2500K to 4.5 GHz makes the performance with our "low-preset" go up by almost 14 percent but when it comes to the high-preset the increase in performance is only 2 percent. Regarding the AMD A10-6800K the situation is similar: 1.6 percent gain with "low-preset" and 0.15 percent with "high-preset". What's quite interesting to see is how the wattage of our test system increased while maintaining 4.5 GHz stably. The Intel Core i5-2500K needed an additional 14 percent more power and in case of the 6800K we had to notice, that the CPU had been throttling and this despite the fact, that we were using a powerful aircooler - Phanteks PH-TC14PE.

At this point we want to go back to the question we were asking at the beginning of this review. Should you be thinking about buying a used CPU, should you go for an Intel Core i5-2500K or an AMD A10-6800K? To us the answer is a no-brainer. The Intel Core i5-2500K is not only faster by quite a maring also power consumption is way lower. Other than that the Core i5-2500K is almost bullet proof when it comes to overclocking and driving this CPU at 4.5 GHz should be piece of cake on almost any motherboard.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 9 - Far Cry 3
Page 2 - Test Setup	Page 10 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 3 - 3DMark Fire Strike	Page 11 - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Page 4 - Unigine Heaven 4.0	Page 12 - Metro: Last Light
Page 5 - BattleField 3	Page 13 - Power Consumption
Page 6 - Bioshock Infinite	Page 14 - Performance Index
Page 7 - Crysis 3	Page 15 - Conclusion
Page 8 - Call of Duty Black Ops 2