Gaming Tests

And finally some gaming benchmarks, the favorite review page for all gamers. Five popular and new titles are chosen to represent every game genre. Far Cry 2 and Section 8 for FPS gamers, Resident Evil 5 for adventure gamers, HAWX and GTR Evolution for simulation gamers. GTR Evolution is a bit older but it shows how it is done when it comes to using multiple cores on a CPU.

In game quality details for all resolutions are set to following:

• Tom Clancy's HAWX v1.1 - high details
• Resident Evil 5 benchmark - medium details
• Section 8 v1.0 - high details
• GTR Evolution v1.0 - high details, Level 1 AA
• Far Cry 2 v1.3 - DirectX 10, High Detail

While you can call the new Athlon II X2 series a budget CPU, you might also refer to them as budget gaming CPUs. Compared to AMD's Phenom II X2 at the same frequency but with 512 KB L2 cache per core and big 6 MB L3 cache, Athlon II X2 240 is not that much slower at all. On average it's a 3-5 FPS performance drop which means it performs almost as well as the much more expensive Phenom II X2 models. It also opens up a noticeable advantage over Pentium E5200 which is a couple of Dollars more than the X2 240, and Celeron E1600 is just not that suited to gaming. We included a Phenom II X3 710 model in the graphs to show the performance differences between two cores and more than two cores computing.

Far Cry 2

Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.

Resident Evil 5

GTR Evolution

Section 8