HARDOCP - Test Setup - Real World Gameplay CPU Scaling

Date:: Tuesday , May 19, 2009
Author:: Brent Justice
Editor:: Kyle Bennett
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Real World Gameplay CPU Scaling

Four processors; Intel Core i7 920, Intel Core 2 QX9650, AMD Phenom II X4 810, & AMD Phenom II X3 720 BE. Seven games. REAL WORLD GAMEPLAY at stock clocks and all overclocked to 3.6GHz, head to head, & apples to apples.

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Testing Setup

Evaluation Method

We evaluate what each system can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and "eye candy" graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home.

We will follow with apples-to-apples testing with minimum, maximum, and average framerates on each game page.

Hardware

We will be using a Gigabyte EX58-UD5 motherboard, an ASUS M4A79T Deluxe motherboard and an ASUS P5E3 Premium motherboard.

We will also be using Corsair TR3X6G1600C8D Dominator DDR3 and Corsair CM3X2048-1600C7DHXIN Intel Extreme DDR3 as well as Corsair CM3X1024-1800CD Dominator DDR3.

At the time we started testing the latest WHQL Catalyst driver was Catalyst 9.3, which was used in all testing. Yes, six different test specs across seven games gives us 42 different scenarios to be tested, compared, analyzed, written up, then edited. It takes a little bit of time…