Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 965: Not Just A Speed Bump

Name: Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 965: Not Just A Speed Bump - Page 11
Brand: Intel

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, March 22, 2006, 10:00 AM EDT

We took a different approach for this next batch of in-game benchmarks. In a recent poll of our readers, we found that 1280x1024 is the most popular resolution that our readers use to play their games. So, for this next set of tests we configured Half Life 2 and Quake 4 to run at that resolution with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled, and re-ran our benchmarks.

Benchmarks with Half Life 2: Mainstream Settings

DirectX 9 Gaming Performance

The playing field levels a bit with the resolution cranked up in Half Life 2. This time around, the Athlons were still faster than anything from the Intel camp, but their margins of victory were only about 6 and 15 frames per second.

Benchmarks with Quake 4: Mainstream settings

OpenGL Gaming Performance

With Quake 4 running at a higher resolution with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled, the GeForce 7800 GTX we used for testing became the bottleneck, and all of the systems tested post a nearly identical framerate. It's interesting to see that, while small, the Intel systems did end up with a slight advantage here.

Tags: Intel, Speed, Xtreme, extreme, edition, ium, Extreme Edition, Pentium, pen, XT, eme, BU, bump

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