Enter The Dragon: AMD Phenom II X4 940

Name: Enter The Dragon: AMD Phenom II X4 940 - Page 9
Brand: Enter

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, January 08, 2009, 12:01 AM EDT

For our next set of tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with Crysis and F.E.A.R. When testing processors with Crysis or F.E.A.R., we drop the resolution to 800x600, and reduce 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.

Low-Resolution Gaming: Crysis and F.E.A.R.

Taking the GPU out of the Equation

Crysis and F.E.A.R. told constrasting stories. In the Crysis CPU benchmark, the new Phenom II X4 processors smoked the Phenom X4 9950, but fell victim to every Intel CPU. The story is very different in F.E.A.R., however, where the Phenom II X4 940 put up the best score of the bunch and the X4 920 squeaked by the Core 2 Extreme Q9650 and Core i7 920.

Tags: AMD, Radeon, processor, quad-core, dragon, Phenom

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com