Performance Testing Results
Let us start with an older benchmark at 1024x768 to clearly see the effects of raw frequency.

Aquamark shows us that in an application that doesn’t support multi-threads the E8500 just rips the Q6600 a new one. Also, by using a lower resolution we’ve place more of the bottleneck on the CPU. There is no way to sweeten the results here for the Q6600.

Unreal Tournament 3 actually does use multiple threads and here we see the Q6600 just slightly off the performance of the E8500. More cores makes up for frequency here. It takes only 3.8Ghz with the Q6600 to match 4.5Ghz on the dual core in UT3.

Half Life 2 Eposide 2 is another good example of taking a single threaded application and letting the raw frequency tear it up. Some 40 FPS difference between them using the HOC Bench utility.

FEAR fared much better, patched up and using the ingame performance test the average was the same. The max fps was in favor of the E8500 but we can see the higher minimun provided by the E8500. This made actual gameplay smoother. Score another one for the E8500.

Crysis Warhead we are going to break into 1440x900 and 1680x1050 for the simple reason to see if at a lower resolution the CPU comes into play more than at higher resolution. At 1440x900 we can actually see the quad core edge out the E8500 ever so slightly. I used the gamer settings and no AA for these tests. Crysis is GPU limited at almost every resolution higher than 1024x768. And they said we’d need a quad for Crysis, not true at all.

At 1680x1050 performance is a bit lower but again the CPU didn’t seem to play a part at all in the results.

There is more to this than meets the eye however, read on.

Next Page - Important Information on 45nm & Conclusion

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