Higher Clock Speeds, No TLB Issues and Better Pricing: The New Phenom

Gaming Performance

Supreme Commander

Supreme Commander is a popular RTS (Real Time Strategy) title that can be very CPU dependent. Our benchmark involves playing back, as fast as possible, a 4-person match and recording the simulation time for the replay in seconds.

We ran Supreme Commander at 1920 x 1200 with High fidelity presets, v-sync was disabled.

Here's one area where AMD needs pure clock speed to keep up, even the old X2 6400+ is able to outperform the latest Phenom processors. As long as you have two cores you're golden in Supreme Commander, but AMD's K8 and Phenom architectures are clearly slower under Supreme Commander.

Crysis

The most demanding FPS on the market right now is Crysis, and we couldn't resist using it as a benchmark. We ran at 1024 x 768 with Medium Quality defaults and used the game's built in CPU benchmark.

More than anything you're going to be GPU limited with Crysis, but in terms of how well these CPUs handle the workload given to them by the game - Intel continues to take the cake here.

Oblivion: Shivering Isles

Our Oblivion benchmark is the same one we use in our GPU reviews. Oblivion can vary from being CPU limited to GPU limited depending on the scene, we picked one that was GPU limited to illustrate that even with a wide array of CPUs when you're GPU limited, the differences can be little if anything:

Half Life 2 Episode Two

Half Life 2 is obviously more CPU limited these days, and we continue to see that Intel is ahead of the pack when it comes to pure CPU gaming performance.