Refine search for CPUs and Memory

  12 comments      Email TrustedReviews Newsletters

It's arguable that for many of you, gaming performance will be of paramount interest when it comes to buying new parts for your PC. However, the simple fact of the matter is, if you have a powerful gaming PC, CPU performance is not going to be your bottleneck. So long as you have a reasonably nippy dual core or quad core CPU, you'll be fine. It's for this reason we didn't go to town with our game testing and have looked at just two games, Crysis and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

Both games use scripting to run through a custom time demo, with framerates recorded along the way. Each setting is run three times and an average taken to ensure a consistent and fair result. We used a 'low' graphical setting to demonstrate the affect a fast CPU can have when graphics card performance isn't a bottleneck and then we used a 'high' setting to show the limited effect a fast CPU has when your graphics card is the bottleneck.

Crysis

Unfortunately, our QX9770 test bed refused to run Crysis at 1,920 x 1,200 with 4xAA but even so, I think we can safely guess how things may have panned out. The QX9770 would probably have just snuck ahead in this otherwise largely graphics card limited situation.

While we could conclude the Core i7 processors are 'bad' for gaming because they're a little slower than the QX9770, the margin is slim enough that we would say it wouldn't be enough to alter your buying decision in any way...

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

...particularly as Enemy Territory: Quake Wars proves that it's not all one way traffic.

What we can safely conclude, though, is that AMD's CPUs comparatively struggle in gaming.

Add your comment