Date:
Friday , July 14, 2006
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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Intel Core 2 Gaming Performance

We test Intel's Core 2 Duo and Extreme using real-world gaming. Don't let a bunch of canned benchmarks lie to you about gaming performance, real gameplay experience tells a different story. Unless of course you game at 800x600.

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System Test Setup:

For our system platform setup, we are using an ASUS P5B Deluxe with an Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 2.93GHz CPU and an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66 GHz CPU. For the comparison platform, we are using an ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe with an AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 2.8 GHz CPU. Both platforms have 2GB of fast DDR2 800 Corsair RAM. We are using a clean installation with latest chipset drivers as of testing. For the video card, we are using the latest ForceWare 91.33 beta drivers.

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The BFGTech GeForce 7900 GTX OC was common to both systems with the same ForceWare 91.33 driver and default driver settings.

Evaluation Setup

Please be aware we are testing a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each CPU provides. The highest playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. Following the highest playable section will be an “apples-to-apples” section to see what these CPUs do at lower settings.

In our graphs, we use some abbreviations to indicate the method of AA being used.

TR MSAA = Transparency Multisampling Antialiasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Multisampling quality setting on GeForce 7 series video cards.

TR SSAA = Transparency Supersampling Antialiasing – Indicates the use of NVIDIA’s Transparency Supersampling quality setting on GeForce 7 series video cards.