Alien: Isolation

If first person survival mixed with horror is your sort of thing, then Alien: Isolation, based off of the Alien franchise, should be an interesting title. Developed by The Creative Assembly and released in October 2014, Alien: Isolation has won numerous awards from Game Of The Year to several top 10s/25s and Best Horror titles, ratcheting up over a million sales by February 2015. Alien: Isolation uses a custom built engine which includes dynamic sound effects and should be fully multi-core enabled. We take the average frame rate as our marker with a scripted version of the built-in benchmark.

For this test we used the following settings with our graphics cards:

Alien Isolation Settings
  Resolution Quality
Low GPU Integrated Graphics 1280x720 Ultra
ASUS R7 240 1GB DDR3
Medium GPU MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB 1920x1080 Ultra
MSI R9 285 Gaming 2G
High GPU ASUS GTX 980 Strix 4GB 1920x1080 Ultra
MSI R9 290X Gaming 4G

Alien Isolation on MSI R9 285 Gaming 2GB ($240)

Alien Isolation on MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB ($245)

Alien Isolation on MSI R9 290X Gaming LE 4GB ($380)

Alien Isolation on ASUS GTX 980 Strix 4GB ($560)

Alien Isolation in this case favors a higher IPC, and so as a result the Intel processors are quite high on the list. The biggest differences are when using the high-end graphics cards: the R9 290X and the GTX 980, which give a 10-20% increase in favor of the Pentium.

Stock Comparison: Legacy Gaming Comparison: Total War: Attila
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  • Chaser - Friday, July 15, 2016 - link

    Yeah lets celebrate another year of 10 or so of AMD's paper launches of incredible CPUs. Bulldozer was awesome dude!
  • Dr. Swag - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    Yes, the review is finally here! Yes!
  • nandnandnand - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    A review for a chip nobody should buy, because it's much worse than Zen will be.
  • Laxaa - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    I wish there was a AM3+ version of Zen for us stuck on that platform. I'm not that interessted in getting a new motherboard(perhaps I should have stuck with Intel instead)
  • Peichen - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    You should have stuck with Intel. I buy into AMD's upgrade CPU, motherboard at different time scheme and is now stuck with a hot old CPU and a quite new motherboard with unreliable RAID controller. Junk the whole system means I toss out a 1.5 years old motherboard. Upgrade the CPU means not much performance increase and when the board's RAID fail I will have to buy AMD again so I won't throw out a new CPU.

    I wish I pay slightly more for an i3 or i5 and have a reliable media/light-gaming system for 6 years without all the hassle.
  • just4U - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    well.. then you'd have been stuck with a socket 1156 cpu and no board to go with it.. Intel's gone thru what.. 5 socket changes during the last 6-7 years.. There's something to be said for throwing a 2009 cpu into a 2016 board, and it's easy enough to (at some point..) change over to one of their newer processors in that lineup.

    It's also a hit/miss on any hardware. While some go the distance lasting a long time .. other's fail and it's not exclusive to either platform. I use processors from both camps. +/- for both. Just depends what your using your system for and what your expecting to get out of it.
  • pats1111 - Thursday, July 14, 2016 - link

    I don't know why you're whining about a 1.5 year old mainboard. Typically, your NORMAL computer enthusiast is upgrading everything every 2 to 3 years. You have the same issues with Intel, platform changes occur every 1.5 years, and you're stuck with your "old, hot" processor. Wake up and embrace the technological advancement in front of you...
  • Nagorak - Monday, July 18, 2016 - link

    What advancement?
  • artk2219 - Wednesday, July 20, 2016 - link

    Ding ding ding, we have the real question. Sure skylake is faster than sandy bridge, but compared to the advancement that 4 years used to make in chip tech, its nothing. An average of 25% IPC increase, most of which you can get back by bumping the clocks 30%, which most sandy bridge chips would do easily. Granted with skylake chip is more efficient, with more features, and better a igp, and blah blah blah. But honestly, for most things you would never notice, and dont even get me started on how pointless DDR4 is currently. But even that atleast will mature with time, unfortunately I'm sure you'll need another new socket to really realize its benefits.

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-r...

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-r...
  • wiboonsin - Monday, July 10, 2017 - link

    What a great blog. I like the way you see http://www.dicksrunningshop.com/ . Thank you!

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