My thoughts on Tek Syndicate's new FX-3850 video

(.gif just for comedic relief. I am not trying to imply anything)

Tek Syndicate made a new video (link here) where they addressed a lot of the issues with the first one, but it's still far from perfect if you ask me. So, here are my issues with their new video.


Before I start with the issue I'd like to give credit where credit is due. Here are the things they fixed in their new video:

• More powerful GPU. I would have liked to see lower resolution as well to eliminate the GPU bottleneck as much as possible but whatever. It's nice to see that they at least did something to try to fix the issue.
• The systems were very similar. Very glad to see that they fixed that.
• They now show a graph showing the FPS. Much easier to see and read. I didn't see/hear him report any wrong numbers either, unlike the last video when he did that multiple times.

Anyway, here are my issues with this video. Again, it's far better but not perfect by any stretch of the imagination.

At around 2:50 they say that a lot of websites agree with their results. Let's look at these results that agree with them, shall we?
First up, Hardware.info. Here is a summary of their benchmarks:

Maybe this is just me, but these results doesn't agree with their results at all. Just look at the difference in percent. Logan also cherry picked and only showed the one instance where the AMD CPU beats the Intel one.

So according to Logan, the i5-3570K should beat the FX-3580 by ~32% in Crysis 2. Hardware.info on the other hand, shows either a 1,74% difference, or a 3% difference (depending on resolution and settings). That's not what I call "agreeing with their results".

But what about the results from Hardware Canucks?
Again, their results shows completely different results than what Logan got.

The Intel CPU beats the AMD according to Hardware Canucks as well.
I am not sure about what you think, but it seems to me that even the sources Logan recommends contradict his results.


At 3:05 they try to pull the "we are not fanboys, we use Intel" card. Of course they do. Intel has dominated AMD for a long time now. To me, this just sounds like the old "I am not racist, I got a black friend".
Also, like I said in my previous post I don't think they are bniased. It's just that their testing methods are flawed in some way.


At 4:00 they talk about Intel cheating on Cinebench. I am not going to defend for that. It is a horrible thing to do but let's be honest, does it really matter for us consumers? If some compilers are biased towards Intel then to me that sounds like a reason to get an Intel processor, since it will perform better. We can't do much about it. It's up to the developers to optimize for whichever platform they want.

He claims that he does "real world testing" but he also says that he deliberately pick games such as Trine 2 since they are indie games? That sounds like cherry picking to me.

At 4:44 they talk about the patch from Microsoft. From what I have read, there isn’t really any issue with the caching like Logan said. What happens is that Windows 7 currently detects each bulldozer module as 2 cores. This means that if you got two threads running, both of those will be assigned to the same module, and will have to share some resources such as the FPU. What the patch does is makes it so that if you got two threads running, they will both run on separate modules, and therefore won’t have to share resources. According to AMD, this is not an issue in Windows 8. Even the website you show in the video (Tom’s hardware) tells you this. Yes it’s a bit nitpicky but seriously, you should not say things like “it might be an issue on Windows 8” when you got text right in front of you saying that it is not.

So what kind of performance difference can you get with these patches? I have seen people say that it is because of these Logan get such strange results. Well I found a blog post by AMD which says this:

Our testing shows that not every application realizes a performance boost. In fact, heavily threaded apps (those designed to use all 8 cores), get little or no uplift from this hotfix – they are already maxing out the processor.  In other cases, the uplift averages out to a 1-2 percent uplift. But heck, it is free performance, and this is the scheduler model that will be used in Windows 8 (along with some further enhancements), so why not add it to your list of downloads?

So the patch will give you a 1 or 2 percent increase in performance. The patch does have some drawbacks though. It will make it so that you go into turbo (clock down some cores and overclock some cores, in order to increase performance per core) less often, and your computer will use slightly more power (cores won't go into idle as often). Not really an issue on desktops but I wouldn't want to use it on a laptop.

The new numbers clearly shows that the GPU was bottlenecking before (much higher numbers on all platforms and in all games) and is most likely still bottlenecking.

I was not really a fan of the whole “but the AMD one will use more power!” argument people where throwing around, just so that we’re clear about that. Power is cheap. Anyway 3 hours a day seems pretty reasonable per day, but that’s without counting anything else. As soon as you start counting with more than 3 hours of gaming, more CPU intense tasks (like maybe a bit of transcoding and stuff like that), and just a bunch of general tasks then the power cost will quickly ramp up and the Intel one will be cheaper in the end (after 3 or fewer years).

I don’t quite get what he is talking about at 14:00. Drivers? Well yes the drivers for the chipset which controls things like the network, audio and such have been improved, but it sounds like he is implying that he has installed a CPU driver which increased performance or something like that. CPUs are not like graphics cards. They don’t need drivers, and again, the patch from Microsoft will only increase performance by 1 or 2 percent. From what I have seen and know, chipset drivers will not increase your CPU performance.

Overall, this video is far better than his last one, which in my opinion was horrible and he should have taken it down. This one is better but still seems rather strange. I got more Tek Syndicate stuff coming since I always find misinformation in their videos (especially when Logan talks about RAM) and it seems like they are gaining popularity. If you are a big show like them they you can't mess things up and spread misinformation like they do.