AMD 8350 & 7970 Gaming Rig Review

Introduction and System Specifications

| Source: AMD Price: Author: Tom Logan

Introductions

When we looked at the AMD A8 Trinity CPU recently we started thinking how nice it was to have AMD back as a sensible choice for a system. As we've said many times we grew up on AMD chips here at OC3D, from the Thunderbirds to the Barton chips and onwards to the Phenom.

As much as we love the amount of performance for a sensible price that Intel provide with their i5's, the reality is that as consumers it's important to have as much choice as possible. A strong AMD line-up forces both Intel and nVidia to raise their games and lower their prices.

So with that in mind we wondered if a system fully based around AMD components could provide a good gaming experience. The newer Catalyst drivers have unlocked a lot of performance in the 7 series Radeon cards, so can a combination of those and a well-overclocked FX CPU give us good value gaming?

System Specifications

We want to give the AMD system the best chance at shining, so with some RAID SSDs and the best of the HD7970s it should be enough to ensure that we see the finest possible performance. With a hefty overclock on the FX8350 and running at the popular 1920x1080 resolution this should give us a good indication of whether the AMD can make the grade.

AMD FX 8350 @ 4.6GHz

Club3D 7970 Royal Ace

8GB of 1600mhz Corsair Vengeance

2x 60GB Corsair Force 3 GT's Raid 0

Corsair AX750w PSU

Corsair H110 CPU Cooler

Corsair 550D Case

We're comparing it to our normal GPU test bench of an Intel Core i7-3960X at 4.6GHz. Motherboard apart the other specifications are identical.

1 - Introduction and System Specifications 2 - 3D Mark 3 - 3D Mark 11 4 - 3D Mark Vantage 5 - Bioshock Infinite & Tomb Raider 6 - Far Cry 3 and Hitman Absolution 7 - Metro 2033 8 - Resident Evil 5 - DX9 9 - Resident Evil 5 - DX10 10 - Resident Evil 6 and Sleeping Dogs 11 - Unigine 0xAA 12 - Unigine 8xAA 13 - Unigine Valley and Maxing it 14 - Conclusion «Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Next»

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