Intel Skulltrail Unleashed: Core 2 Extreme QX9775 x 2
Gaming: Crysis and F.E.A.R.
For our last set of game 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.
Benchmarks with Crysis and F.E.A.R. v1.08
DirectX 9 and 10 Gaming Performance
Crysis and F.E.A.R. tell two very different stories. In the Crysis CPU benchmark, the Skulltrail rig performs quite well, but it can't keep pace with the QX9650 or QX9770. The QX9650 and QX9700 based systems were equipped with much faster DDR3 memory, which offers far more memory bandwidth, and as such the systems are able to outpace Skulltrail.
F.E.A.R., however, was completely CPU bound, and the additional resources afforded by Skulltrails dual-processors and eight cores allowed it to finish the test well ahead of the competition.
