I5 with Sli or I7

Sure. Guru3D and Anandtech got it all wrong. Tom's Hardware corroborates them, as well, so I guess they don't know what they're talking about, either.

To save people from needing to hit the links: the 7850k manages 12fps in Bioshock Infinite at 1080p and high quality settings. Tom's says it gets to 27fps at 1080p/medium. At max settings with Tomb Raider, the 7850K gets up to 8.2fps. Looking at a recent game, the 7850k gets 8fps in Sleeping Dogs at 1080p. And in Company of Heroes 2 (a more CPU intensive game) it gets almost 10fps in 1080p. The best guesses I have for its performance in Crysis 3 is about 16fps at medium quality.

Since many gamers consider framerates of under 30fps to be "unplayable" (or at least "unsatisfactory"), I don't think we can say that the 7850K can play all games at 1080p with max settings.

Actually, check out this thread. Seems the 7850K can't even hit 60fps in WoW, and struggles quite a bit with Battlefield 4.

here is for you:

http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/538..._i7-4770K.html
Source: cpu-world (Best source)

Not counting on future games which will be HSA enabled which is a reality because Xbox, PS4 main consoles for gaming are using AMD chips...

Anyway, for the rest by memory depandent I meant RAM, yes intel does a good job allocating memory on mem intensive programs, but SWTOR is graphic memoery depadant see the difference? its GPU!

Now back to AMD the chips have graphics cards (very good ones) inside. Something Intel doesnt, so AMD is aimed at casual/hardcore gamer, while intel is aimed at General market like offices, stores, labs did I say intel is like the Sith empire? yes! it minituarizes everything without are real result in performance, like i7 is minimal considering i5 performance even unoticiable unless you use benchmarks with most focusing on task per sec.

Amd wins now and in the future so buy AMD.

You were saying...

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/17...-budget-gaming

Anyways, while I'd love to see the two chip companies compete more so we can all get better stuff for less, when it comes to real-world overall performance, I haven't even bothered looking at AMD chips in quite a while because they seem to always be playing catch up.

And while integrated graphics have come a long way, they still don't hold up performance wise to systems with discrete GPUs.

This is a joke right?

please say yes

First, that's just a spec sheet. It doesn't show any performance numbers. Not like this comparison.

No, its not. Look at your CPU utilization graphs. SWTOR requires GPU and CPU power. The GPU power required is dependent on your graphics settings (something you can control). The CPU power required is most heavily dependent on the number of players around you, the number of mobs around you, and what those players and mobs are doing. That is why CPU usage is higher in warzones and ops: lots of players in view constantly performing actions which require your CPU to load, calculate, and move around data for animations.

This is precisely why MMOs and RTSes are more CPU dependent than FPSs; they run large numbers of AI routines and often require constant updates and recalculations based upon network messages.

They have good graphics chips... for on-die graphics. They are destroyed by even mid-level gaming GPUs.

No... AMD is aimed firmly at the budget and cost-efficiency sector. Intel is the CPU of choice for high performance applications, whether that is games, real-time statistics, rendering/graphics or massive data processing. AMD is actually more popular as office and lab machines because they are cheaper and offices aren't hurt by the weaker processing power.

Okay... I see you're just cheering for your team, not trying to give actual advice based on facts.

Please don't force your bias on others who are just searching for answers.

That's not good advice for everyone, though it may be for some. First, if you need it now, buy based on now, not on the future. Both companies will support their latest platforms for long enough that you will replace them before you cannot get spare parts anymore.

Now, while AMD might be good for people on a budget, if you have dropped or plan to drop $300+ into your video card and $1200 into the monitors that are attached to it, as well as $120 for a mechanical keyboard, $140 for a gaming mouse, $60 for a gaming keyboard -- all things with indisputable benefits BTW, if you can afford them -- the price difference between Intel and AMD CPUs becomes pretty irrelevant, and you should just buy an i7 in order to squeeze every last bit of benefit out of the $2000+ you have invested in the rest of the system.

That's just an example of how price-performance of the CPU is the wrong measure -- it is price performance of the system that matters (after taking into account sunk costs, of course - an upgrade that just costs you an AMD chip and motherboard might be better than a similar upgrade to an Intel chip and motherboard, assuming you can find an AMD chip that is actually an upgrade. )

There's a market that is best served by AMD chips, yes. But if you look how people vote with their wallets, it is a smaller market than the one best served by Intel.

I think you might have "card" and "chip" in the incorrect order.

As an owner of an MSI laptop, I would warn you against one. The price/performance is very good on their laptops, but build quality is low. Cheap plastic cases that crack easily and terrible driver support.

More expensive, but I have never been disappointed by Asus build quality and driver availability.

I own that one and have to reduce all settings to LOW to run in 16m OPs with acceptable framerate (meaning ~20 FPS).
Also had to send it in twice already to fix issues.

I would never go for a laptop again - even though it means I can't play when traveling.

Noted.

I've never actually been able to sit in front of an MSI laptop. I only have experience with their motherboards and video cards. Those are usually very well made. I guess I assumed they'd do okay with a full laptop. Seems I assumed wrong. I'll remember that for future recommendations. Thanks for the hands-on info.

Same here. ASUS is the brand I normally suggest, but unfortunately ASUS doesn't have much for gaming in the $900 area. My wife uses a G55 and gets pretty good performance from it (just a few places where the framerate drops to 30fps or so). But we paid $1200 for that. Still, it's been a solid performer with no problems. Doesn't even overheat.