Gaming Performance

Our first 3D game test is our walkthrough of Bruma in the popular RPG Oblivion. This test was run at 1600 x 1200 with Very High quality defaults selected from Oblivion's launcher. FRAPS was used in this benchmark:

Gaming Performance - Oblivion  

We ran Half Life 2: Episode One at 1600 x 1200, with all settings at their maximum values with the exception of AA/anisotropic filtering, which we left disabled.

Gaming Performance - Half Life 2: Episode One

We ran Prey at 1600 x 1200 with High Quality textures, all detail settings were set to their highest options, no AA, and 8X aniso:

Gaming Performance - Prey

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was tested at 1024 x 768 with full dynamic lighting enabled and high quality detail settings:

Gaming Performance - S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

We ran Supreme Commander at 1024 x 768 with medium quality presets. We've changed our Supreme Commander benchmark a bit at the advice of Gas Powered Games' senior engineers. We created a skirmish with 7 AI players and let them duke it out for almost 30 minutes, we saved the replay and then measured the amount of time it took to playback the recording at maximum gamespeed (+10). The figures below are expressed in minutes, lower playback time being better:

Gaming Performance - Supreme Commander

Capcom's Lost Planet demo is available in both DX9 and DX10 flavors, but for this review we used the DX9 version given that we've not been able to find any real benefit to running the DX10 version. We had to run Lost Planet at 800 x 600 with a mixture of high/medium quality settings:

Gaming Performance - Lost Planet Snow Benchmark DX9

Gaming Performance - Lost Planet Cave Benchmark DX9

Photo Processing Performance Final Words
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  • gigahertz20 - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link

    Ahhh man I loved the article but I was hoping for some overclocking benchmarks, very disappointing. I wanted to see an overclocked Q6600 vs. overclocked e6850, there were reports the E6850 can OC up to around 4GHz. I was hoping this article would show us some OC results. Is this planned for later or something?
  • cpeter38 - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link

    Another Ditto!!!!
  • Sunrise089 - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link

    and another!

    All the early Conroe reviews had OC numbers. And yes, by now we realize that as far as dual-cores go, any of the new parts should overclock about the same. It's really important to a lot of users however to know how the overclocking of these new parts matches up to the quad-core part.
  • Frumious1 - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link

    You've got numbers http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3020&am...">like this that have quad core hitting 3.60 GHz with appropriate cooling. Q6600 should easily hit 3.0-3.3 GHz with a reasonable HSF, and if you want something high-end like the Ultra-120 Extreme, maybe even 3.60 GHz (9x400). One more reason to go quad - just mind the energy bills!
  • Sunrise089 - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link

    yes, but what about if the dual-core part is overclocked to 4.0ghz?
  • Frumious1 - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link

    Given that overall performance goes to 2.4 GHz quad core over 3.0 GHz dual core (a 600 MHz difference), I can guarantee that a 3.6 GHz quad core would be better than 4.0 GHz dual core (a 400 MHz difference). That said, for gaming it really wouldn't matter much right now - no games even try to utilize more than two cores that I'm aware of. And don't even think about a 3.6 GHz overclocked quad core chip unless you have a beefy PSU!
  • BikeDude - Tuesday, July 17, 2007 - link

    Flight Simulator X SP1 adds multicore support and should benefit from additional (beyond dual) cores.

    "As I stated previously, our multi-core support will take advantage of both 2 and 4 cores today, and more cores in the future when they become available."
    (http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/archive/2007/05/14/f...">http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/archive/2007/05/14/f...

    I am a bit disappointed that Anandtech doesn't bench FSX. I also miss the compiler benchmarks they used to do. AMD used to do quite well in those... (I say this as someone who uses compilers, not as a former AMD fanboy which I probably am)
  • RamarC - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link

    anyone know what oc results i can expect with a p35-based mobo and a q6600? is 3.0ghz as easy to reach as it is with an e6600?
  • ZDNetReader1 - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link

    Ditto!! What he said!!
  • MrKaz - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link

    Price-wise, the only AMD/Intel competition we have here is between the FX-74 and the Q6700. Do keep in mind that as the FX-74 is a dual-socket configuration, the motherboard is a bit more expensive than what you can use with any of the single-socket quad-core Intel solutions.

    This is obviously true, but it’s also true that Intel motherboards for single socket VS AMD motherboards for single socket are also more expensive.
    In my country equivalent ASUS AMD motherboard VS ASUS INTEL motherboard is around 30% to 50% cheaper.
    Do keep that in mind too.

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