€60 G3258 + €600 GTX980 Benchmarks!

Will add more benchmarks over the next few days! If anyone has any requests, ask away, and if I have it I'll add it. I hope to get through Shadow of Mordor, Tomb Raider, Advanced Warfare, and a few others shortly.

The G3258 is at 4.4Ghz @ 1.3v, can't get anything beyond without crashing at the moment. It's a Z97S Sli Plus, 8Gb of Ballistix 1600mhz (G3258 only support 1333mhz) and the star of the show, the Asus GTX980 Strix. We're looking at 10:90 split in terms of cost here for the CPU: GPU. :eek:

As mentioned in the other thread, Battlefield 4 presented a hiccup in that for reasons as of yet unknown, the game freezes for 1 to 2 seconds occasionally - hence the reading of 0fps as a minimum. A workaround is to enable half refresh v-sync, forcing the game to 30fps and resolving the rare freezing issue, but for the sake of consistency in these benchmarks I benched under normal circumstances.







I've been messing around with this, and with a bit of tweaking it's freezing far less and for shorter period, just a few times per game. I suffered one freeze in an Operation Locker 64-man game earlier. 64 player Operation Locker and Paracel Storm were both totally playable overall in 64-man servers, with averages of about 50-60fps, a miracle for a €60 processor. GPU utilization was about 75% on average. The G3258 pushes good framerates but the lack of hyper-threading really hurts it.







Alien Isolation and Bioshock Infinite performed exceptionally well, with average framerates of about 150. I could utilize the GTX980 almost 100% in these games, something I could not do in most other games.




Ryse Son of Rome performed surprisingly well, with an average of 57 frames per second, once again excellent performance for a €60 processor in a fairly CPU intensive title. My last gaming laptop had AMD's flagship mobile Quad Core the A10-5750; even at 3Ghz that processor could barely break 30fps with an R9 290M, as a comparison. GPU utilization varied, between 70 and 95%.





Company of Heroes 2 is another fairly well balanced system-punisher at ultra settings, performance here was very respectable.





Metal Gear: Ground Zeroes was disappointing, no option beyond 1080p, and generally poor performance considering how the game looks, but overall very acceptable gameplay from a figures point of view. GPU utilization would not rise above approx 55% however, even when I altered entirely GPU dependent settings and the framerate suffered...strange one.





Metro Last Light ran exceptionally well, similar to Ryse Son of Rome, very strong average frames and utilization that jumped between 65 and 95%.



So far, it's a mixed bag. Some games are clearly heavily CPU bound; Battlefield 4 in particular, MGS: Ground Zeroes wasn't too happy with the G3258 either. They're still perfectly playable - but for these games, and games that are similar in hardware requirements, it's clear that an i3 or i5 and something like an R9 280X+ would be the far superior option.

Other games are far more forgiving - Alien Isolation and Bioshock Infinite, two beautiful games, don't care what they're running on and the GTX980 was utilized almost to its full potential. Metro Last Light isn't too fussy either, nor was Ryse Son of Rome, another pair of visually fantastic games that are very punishing on video cards.