Recently I am thinking to upgrade my 2 years old work station, which only comes with a Intel Core i7-3770 and 2 intel 320 series 120GB RAID 0. Other than that, it has a Asus Motherboard. and nothing else. Of course it only has minimal graphics processing power to run games.
Due to my recent stock up, I have quite a few of Gigabytes 970A-Ds3p lying around. I have decided to get an AMD processor with new 4x RAID 0 samsung 120GB Evo. I am not sure I have no luck with AMD/Readon or AMD/radeon itself is not that good compare to Intel.
Years back, I have an Alienware R17x2 Which equiped with 2x Radeon HD5870m. The crossfire is terrible. It oftens gives me overheat and also stutter whenever I try to play games. End up I have to disable one of it. Even the drives some times giving me problem when I was trying to stream a youtube video. It always said the secondary GPU stop responding and etc etc. After sometime I have decided not to get any laptop replacement due to temperature issue and also the weight of it whenever I need to travel.
That's the very first experience I have been with AMD/Radeon. Afterall I think the Radeon GPU is quite value for money.But I believe those have the budget would not care so much about the value it gives, compare to performance.
In terms of AMD-9370, I didn't do much study, since I already got the AMD mother board I thought I can save myself few hundred RM for not getting a new MOBO. Secondly, the price of AMD-9370 is cheaper than Core I7-4770. Previously I was using 3770. Few things I didn't know about AMD processor.
1) I am not sure whether AMD 8 cores are really 8 physical cores or is just like Intel core i7 hyper threading. But this is not important. For most CPU benchmark, even running at higher clock speed. AMD 9370 is having lower benchmark score compare to i7-3770 and of course i7-4770. Passmark, geekbench and cinebench.
2) AMD-9370 doesnt come with Stock FAN or water cooling equipment. You have to purchase it yourself. End up. AMD-9370 and also core i7-4770 is almost the same price. Perhaps 4770 is even cheaper abit after adding a RM 200 Zalman water cooling.
3) I am not sure whether it is AMD RAID controller or the mother or whatever. IT seems 120GB Samsung evo has very good performance. But 4x RAID 0 only gives me max 1GB read and 700MB+ write (Sequential). Other random 4k and etc was not double the speed. It is really dissapointment.
4) It took me great effort to installed windows 7 on the RAID 0 SSD. I am not sure why even by loading the drivers it can't detect my RAID 0 SSD. I have no problem on my RAID 0 SSD during alienware and also Asus.
5) I am not sure whether the benchmark has problem or whatever. The RAM is having lower benchmark score while I am using kingston hyperX 1600mhz. My older PC uses 1333 Mhz only..
Perhaps this is why, Alot of gaming rigs are still Intel. Or perhaps the software are only written for Intel instruction set and not so much on AMD instruction set.
As you can see from this picture. The cat is the focus, from this picture, it might not be too sharp and looks a bit soft. But perhaps I think is the jpg or picture compression issue. Or may be it gets uploaded to Facebook it will get worse.
