The Sandy Bridge Preview

Windows 7 Gaming Performance

Our Bench suite is getting a little long in the tooth, so I added a few more gaming tests under Windows 7 with a new group of processors. We'll be adding some of these tests to Bench in the future but the number of datapoints is obviously going to be small as we build up the results.

Batman is an Unreal Engine 3 game and a fairly well received one at that. Performance is measured using the built in benchmark at the highest image quality settings without AA enabled.

Gaming performance is competitive, but we don't see any huge improvements under Batman.

Dragon Age Origins is another very well received game. The 3rd person RPG gives our CPUs a different sort of workload to enjoy:

Dragon Age on the other hand shows an 11.6% gain vs. the i5 760 and equal performance to the Core i7 880. Given that the i5 2400 is slated to be cheaper than the i5 760, I can't complain.

World of Warcraft needs no introduction. An absurd number of people play it, so we're here to benchmark it. Our test favors repeatability over real world frame rates, so our results here will be higher than in the real world with lots of server load. But what our results will tell you is what the best CPU is to get for playing WoW:

Performance in our WoW test is top notch. The i5 2400 is now the fastest CPU we've ever run through our WoW benchmark, the Core i7 980X included.

We've been working on putting together Starcraft II performance numbers, so here's a quick teaser:

A 12% advantage over the Core i7 880 and an 18% improvement over the Core i5 760.