Introduction

Just one week ago AMD released their new Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards which introduced a new shader architecture and a new manufacturing process. The company's new flagship is the fastest single GPU graphics card in the world, and reviews across the Internet were generally favourable. Today, we test the Radeon HD 7970's CPU scaling, pitting AMD's recently released Bulldozer-based FX-8150 CPU against two formidable Intel opponents.

According to the reviews online, AMD's latest processor architecture delivers surprisingly underwhelming performance, which quickly made it one of the biggest disappointments of the year according to some users. Loyal fanboys despise terms like "Faildozer" and have kept faith in AMD's promise to deliver a competitive high-end gaming capable processor.

Despite disappointing reviews, Bulldozer has gone on to sell quite well and has amassed a certain cult following with enthusiasts who would like to own this CPU regardless of benchmarks. Their purchasing reasons range from supporting the underdog, to setting records with its impressive overclocking abilities (8 GHz+ on LN2) and everything in-between. This has led some of these enthusiasts to clamour for a review of AMD's best in GPUs (Radeon HD 7970) and CPUs (FX-8150) to be compared working together against the Intel CPU competition to see just how well they do, as this seems to present an unknown variable in many end-users' buying decision.

In this review we will pit three CPUs from the popular ~$250 segment against each other using the Radeon HD 7970:

• AMD FX-8150: This is the company's current flagship Bulldozer processor. It features four execution units that show up as eight cores in Windows, its Turbo clocks up to 4.2 GHz and it has plenty of cache, the processor is priced competitively at $270.
• Intel Core i5-2500K: The processor most gamers and overclockers use. Thanks to its "K" suffix it enables significant overclocking unlike the cheaper Sandy Bridge processors, yet comes at an affordable price of $220. Actually this makes it the cheapest processor in today's test group.
• Intel Core i7-920: While it does not use a sexy 32 nm production process and is based on Intel's last generation Nehalem architecture, it still packs a punch especially when overclocked. It is also an affordable choice if you are looking to run a multi-GPU gaming rig at full 2x PCIe x16 without breaking the bank (LGA 2011).

Test System

Benchmark scores in this review are not comparable to any other review.

• We used the same Windows installation on all systems and moved the HDD between test rigs.
• All games were set to their highest quality setting unless indicated otherwise.
• AA and AF are applied via in-game settings, not via the driver's control panel.

Each benchmark was tested at the following settings and resolution:

• 1024 x 768, No Anti-aliasing. This is a standard resolution without demanding display settings.
• 1280 x 1024, 2x Anti-aliasing. Common resolution for most smaller flatscreens today (17" - 19"). A bit of eye candy turned on in the drivers.
• 1680 x 1050, 4x Anti-aliasing. Most common widescreen resolution on larger displays (19" - 22"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
• 1920 x 1200, 4x Anti-aliasing. Typical widescreen resolution for large displays (22" - 26"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.
• 2560 x 1600, 4x Anti-aliasing. Highest possible resolution for commonly available displays (30"). Very good looking driver graphics settings.

Aliens vs. Predator

Aliens vs. Predator is based on a merger of the Aliens and the Predators franchise: two legendary alien species that are in conflict with each other, fighting to the death with human marines caught in between. The first person shooter game was developed by Rebellion Studios, who also developed the first AVP PC title and released in February 2010. It is one of the first DirectX 11 games with support for new features like tesselation, which is why AMD heavily promoted it at the time of their DX 11 card launches. We use the AVP benchmark utility with tesselation and advanced DX11 shadows enabled.