Dell XPS 630 Gaming Desktop System
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For our next set of tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with the Crysis SP demo and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. When testing processors with Crysis or ET:QW, we drop the resolution to 800x600, and reduced all of the in-game graphical options to their minimum values to isolate CPU and memory performance as much as possible. However, the in-game effects, which control the level of detail for the games' physics engines and particle systems, are left at their maximum values, since these actually do place some load on the CPU rather than GPU.
Although you may think CPU performance should be the main factor in these low-res gaming benchmarks, we found that Crysis testing still favored our dual-core reference system. The closest the XPS 630 could get was 6 frames behind, when using the CAS4 rated DDR2-800. Frame rates slipped a bit as the CAS ratings rose. ETQW was the opposite, with the reference system falling to the rear. Here, CAS latencies seemingly did not have such an adverse effect on the frame rates, with the XPS 630 equipped with the lower rated DDR2-800 outrunning it when using DDR2-667.
