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

As seen in previous benchmark graphs, Athlon II X3 425 has no problem producing on par performance with the $109 Phenom II X3 710 - thanks to the 100 MHz faster clock speed. Most of the general computing applications don't take that much of a performance drop with L3 cache removed, but gaming wise, it's a whole different story.

In most gaming tests Athlon II X3 425 produces more or less identical performance as Athlon II X4 620. That may sound good, but you should take in consideration that Athlon II X4 620 is struggling to beat the dual core Phenom II X2 550, and AMD's triple core Phenom II X3 710 is most of the time way out of reach. Simply put, Athlon II X3 and X4 series are not designed for gamers, that doesn't mean they can't run games, but are rather aimed at average budget users.

Far Cry 2

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

Resident Evil 5

GTR Evolution

Section 8