Gaming Benchmarks
Now the fun begins, and it’s for a reason better than simply being able to play computer games because I “have to”. Gaming benchmarks use real world performance to show whether or not a processor like the Phenom 9850 has any affect on performance, and how drastic that affect is. We weren’t able to balance FPS and RTS games as well as in the Phenom 9600 review, but the lineup chosen makes for a good cross section of popular games and decent benchmark titles.
Supreme Commander
Certain games don’t age well as benchmark titles, which is the reason why we dropped Company of Heroes for this review. The performance shown in that game just doesn’t scale. It appears that Supreme Commander is first mate on that same boat. The graph shown here is rather deceiving, as the performance difference between stock speeds and overclocked was less than 1% when running the built-in benchmark at maximum settings with a resolution of 1680×1050. Though the benchmark for SupCom is another composite score, the CPU is weighted a fair degree due to the amount of AI present in the game.
So with all that in mind, it’s no surprise when I say that gameplay was smooth and without issue. While playing, I ran Fraps to see what framerates were being produced. They never dropped below 60 frames per second. I think we’ll need to move to some more punishing games. Bring on the 3D shooters.
Half Life 2: Episode 2
The first 3D shooter to be tested was Half Life2, and specifically Episode 2. This latest instalment takes place in the backwoods around City 17, and has some additional graphical tricks over the original Half Life 2. For testing we used the same HardwareOC benchmark tool we used in our review of the ZOTAC video card. The tool was set to defaults, with the resolution ramped up to 1680×1050, and we ran through both included demos. Each demo showed a 6% and 7% performance difference, respectively, between stock speeds and overclocked speeds.
Playability was a non-issue with this and most other games based on the Source Engine. The defaults used in the benchmark tool are fairly low, and I can still average 70FPS when ramping up settings and adding antialiasing and anisotropic filtering. With the processor overclocked, that average rises to the high 70s.
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