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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 as long as you have a reasonably nippy dual, triple, 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 frame rates 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 effect 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 still refused to run Crysis at 1,920 x 1,200 with 4xAA - this is an ongoing problem - but even so, I think we can safely guess how things may have panned out. The QX9770 would probably have just crept ahead in this otherwise largely graphics card limited situation.

Looking at the two CPUs we're focussing on today and straight away there is a clear trend. Raw clock speed is still more important than the number of cores when gaming. Secondly, the extra bandwidth the DDR3 provides does make a discernible difference in performance. All in all, not a bad start for the X3 720 BE and X4 810.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

The trend seen in Crysis continues here with these new CPUs proving really quite capable.

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