Ivy Bridge-E Overclocking With EVGA And Corsair

Name: Core i7-4960X Ivy Bridge-E Overclocking with EVGA and Corsair
Brand: Core

by Dave Altavilla — Wednesday, November 06, 2013, 12:47 PM EDT

Bioshock Infinite and Total War: Shogun 2

Page 6: Bioshock Infinite and Total War: Shogun 2

In our gaming tests, we've run two sets of numbers here to illustrate a point. Specifically, if you're "GPU-bound" in any game engine or title, cranking up CPU or Memory speeds isn't going to buy you much. We will, however, toss in the one caveat that if you have a multi-GPU setup, small overhead from inter-GPU communication can be alleviated with stronger CPU and Memory subsystem performance.

Regardless, we ran both Shogun Total War 2 and Bioshock Infinite benchmarks, at high resolution / high image quality settings as well as medium resolution / medium image quality settings to show you the total picture.

Total War: Shogun 2 and Bioshock Infinite Game Tests

Total War: Shogun 2 is a turn-based strategy game that loads up lots of tons of battle units on the screen at once, along with DX11 terrain tessellation and ambient occlusion. It can be a pretty sizable overall stress test for midrange setups.

And thankfully our setup is anything but "midrange." Here, the overclocked Core i7-4960X Ivy Bridge and 2400MHz memory setup posts almost negligible gains at high res but a modest 12 percent kicker at 720p with medium settings.

Bioshock Infinite is based on the Unreal Engine 3 but with added effects that do place a bit more stress on the graphics subsystem. Overall it's less workload than Total War: Shogun 2, so we turned up the resolution a bit to 2560X1600 on the high end tests.

More of the same here. At high resolution, we're almost completely GPU-bound but at 720p with medium IQ settings we see about a 10% gain in frame rate.