Gaming Performance using Battlefield 2, Call of Duty 2 and Quake 4

Gaming performance is pretty respectable for the Pentium EE 955, with the chip being quite competitive with AMD's Athlon 64 X2 4800+.

The most interesting thing we found is that even with a high end GPU like the Radeon X1800 XT, a number of games are still quite GPU limited even at 1024x768, which is why you don't see F.E.A.R. and Splinter Cell: CT here. Even some of the games that we did required us to turn down some of the detail settings to start to stress the CPUs.

The pendulum often swings between games being CPU and GPU limited, and it seems that with the latest generation of games, we are definitely more GPU limited.

Battlefield 2

Battlefield 2 performance of the FX-60 is quite strong; however, the single core FX-57 is still able to hold a slight advantage over the newcomer. The performance difference isn't noticeable, but it is worth pointing out.

We should also mention that we had to re-run our AMD numbers in this test since the last review as we were seeing sub-par AMD performance. A clean install and re-run of the numbers yielded the results that you see today; the Intel numbers didn't change.

Call of Duty 2

Once again, Call of Duty 2 shows that the FX-60 is nipping at the heels of the FX-57, but not exactly outperforming it. That being said, our CoD2 test appears to be quite GPU bound even at 1024 x 768 with a X1800 XT, so the difference in performance here is minor at best.

We did run with SMP support disabled, as we found in our last article that the game gave us higher frame rates without it enabled.

Quake 4

For Quake 4, we turned to the latest 1.05 beta SMP patch, with SMP enabled, to give us these results. When more multithreaded games start shipping, you should see a performance breakdown similar to this, with the single core FX-57 not able to keep up with the new king of the hill: the FX-60.

Media Encoding Performance using DVD Shrink, WME9, Quicktime and iTunes Final Words
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  • AnandThenMan - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    What no overclocking tests. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? The thing is totally unlocked! What the hell.
  • ViRGE - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    It's the same Toledo core as the rest of the 1MB X2's, I doubt it would overclock much better in the first place.
  • Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    With a retail AMD heatsink/fan, the best we could do is 2.8GHz at 1.40V. With more exotic cooling you could probably manage better, but stepping up the voltage all the way up to 1.50V wouldn't yield a 3GHz overclock on air.

    I'm going to update the article with the results, I meant to have them in the conclusion initially but it slipped my mind when posting.

    Take care,
    Anand
  • ckbrame - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    Where can I get one woot woot!

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