Testing The Processors

The Testbed

Testing Methodology

We tested exclusively in Windows Vista, with the latest updates. We chose these five benchmarks to evaluate the processors :

• Supreme Commander
• Crysis CPU Test 2 - Ice
• CINEBENCH R10
• x264 Benchmark
• Super PI Mod

Supreme Commander is a DirectX 9 real-time strategy game. It is a very CPU-intensive game and will serve well as an example of a CPU-limited game. For more information, please take a look at our Supreme Commander Benchmarking Guide.

Crysis is the latest game in our arsenal. It is currently the most strenous test of a graphics card's capability but it also has two CPU tests, with a new Ice map test. For more information, please take a look at our Crysis Benchmarking Guide.

All games were tested at 16x AF and no AA, unless stated otherwise. The use of the latest NVIDIA ForceWare 169.28 beta driver had a problem - it would not allow the resolution of 1920 x 1200 to be selected in Crysis. Therefore, we tested Crysis at the maximum resolution of 1920 x 1080.

A minimum of 5 test runs were performed at each setting. The three closest results were taken and averaged to obtain the final frame rate. If the test results varied too much, the entire test was repeated.

Game Settings

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