Game tests

Computer games are to be considered one of the toughest tests for a computer system - to play a game at its highest resolution, with full anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, you not only need a powerful graphics card, but also a fast CPU, that is capable of delivering data to the GPU.

F.E.A.R.

To benchmark F.E.A.R., the ingame utility was used.


Our first game test shows quite a disappointment - only a 3 FPS gain with using four cores. More interestingly, overclocking the CPU had no effect whatsoever on the final framerate.

Quake 4

Games based on the Doom 3 engine support multi-core CPUs. We tried Quake 4 with the latest patch installed, with both SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing) enabled and disabled.


I personally found this test very interesting. Let's take a close look at how much performance we gain on each CPU model by enabling SMP. Starting with the lowest two of the lot, the E6400 and E6600 receive an increase of 35 FPS. Next, we have the E6700 - the average FPS is improved by 32. Our quad core QX6700 - this achieves 29 more frames each second with four cores instead of one. Lastly, the overclocked Kentsfield - only 14 frames difference!

As we can clearly see, in our benchmark, the performance increased the higher/better the CPU used was, but the increase was not proportional. This leads me to believe that some component, in this case most probably the graphics card, was limiting the performance of the whole computer, and the CPU.

Call of Duty 2

To benchmark Call of Duty 2 the techPowerUp! demo was used.

Unreal Tournament 2004

Even though UT2004 is not among the newest of games, it still is one of my favorites. Its 2007 sequel is highly anticipated.


We can see a decent, 12 FPS increase by going Quad Core.