Intel Core i7-3970X Sandy Bridge-E CPU Review

For our next series of tests, we moved on to some more in-game benchmarking with Crysis and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. When testing processors with Crysis or ET:QW, we drop the resolution to 1024x768, 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 a load on the CPU rather than GPU.

The Core i7-3970X took the top spot in both of our low-res gaming benchmarks. The processor's 6-cores, relatively large caches, and higher clocks gave in an edge over the other processors in the games we tested.