I have gone back and forth between the big brands over the years, especially the GPU. As soon as the dollar to performance graph begins to taper off, that’s where I buy. I usually end up buying right in the middle of the family line, be it CPU or GPU, unless there is a great sale going on or a well priced part totally outperforms it’s price point.
Yes sometimes the software or games I use has made a difference in the purchase decision, but usually I am building for the long haul, so what I am using now isn’t the end all. Whether it’s AMD vs Intel, or AMD/(ATI) vs nVidia. I simply buy the best bang for the buck part best suited to my needs. I have kept quiet until now as I didn’t see what all the fuss was… I have been reading TR for awhile now as my other Tech sites are so inundated with video adds in the margins.
If you'd like to see how your chip measures up, you can grab CPU-Z 1.79 at the program's download page. The 32-bit version soldiers on with the legacy x87 instructions.
The benchmark is written in C++ and uses SSE2 instructions in the 64-bit version of the app. The CPU-Z team says the new benchmark computes a two-dimensional noise function in a way that a game might use to generate procedural data. Furthermore, the team says that due to the extreme unlikelihood of that specific sequence of instructions showing up in non-benchmark software, it felt it would be best to revise CPU-Z to reflect real-world results more accurately. Ordinarily, that kind of automatic optimization would be welcome, but upon further investigation, the CPU-Z team failed to replicate that behavior with Ryzen CPUs in real-world situations. After a thorough investigation, the team discovered that Ryzen CPUs were executing a certain sequence of integer instructions in a way that avoided an intentional delay, producing improperly-inflated benchmark numbers. The change was prompted due to an issue with one of the benchmarking algorithms used by the software.ĬPU-Z's developers say they saw unexpectedly-excellent results on AMD's Ryzen CPUs that ran counter to the new processors' real-world performance. Starting with the latest CPU-Z release, version 1.79, benchmark results will be quite different from those gathered using previous versions.
We don't use it here at TR, but the CPU-Z benchmark has served me well in my personal life as a figurative hand-to-the-forehead for poorly-performing systems.