Gaming performance

F.E.A.R.
We tested F.E.A.R. by manually playing through a specific point in the game five times for each CPU while recording frame rates using the FRAPS utility. Each gameplay sequence lasted 60 seconds. This method has the advantage of simulating real gameplay quite closely, but it comes at the expense of precise repeatability. We believe five sample sessions are sufficient to get reasonably consistent and trustworthy results. In addition to average frame rates, we've included the low frames rates, because those tend to reflect the user experience in performance-critical situations. In order to diminish the effect of outliers, we've reported the median of the five low frame rates we encountered.

We played F.E.A.R. with both CPU and graphics performance options set to the game's built-in "High" settings.

Above the following benchmark graph, and throughout most of the tests in this review, we've included a Task Manager plot showing CPU utilization. These plots were captured on the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 system, and they should offer some indication of how much impact multithreading has on the operation of each application. Single-threaded apps may sometimes show up as spread across multiple processors in Task Manager, but the total amount of space below all four lines shouldn't equal more than the total area of one square if the test is truly single-threaded. Anything significantly more than that is probably an indication of some multithreaded component in the execution of the test. Because WorldBench's tests are entirely scripted, however, we weren't able to capture Task Manager plots for them.

Battlefield 2
We used FRAPS to capture BF2 frame rates just as we did with F.E.A.R. Graphics quality options were set to BF2's canned "High" quality profile. This game has a built-in cap at 100 frames per second, and we intentionally left that cap enabled so we could offer a faithful look at real-world performance.

Unreal Tournament 2004
We used a more traditional recorded timedemo for testing UT2004, but we tried out two versions of the game, the original 32-bit flavor and the 64-bit version.

Half-Life 2
We also decided to try out the 64-bit version of Half-Life 2. This one is also a timedemo.

Our real-world application benchmarks begin painfully for the Extreme Edition 965, as it shows itself to be the cream of Intel's crop but not up to the task of taking on AMD's finest. This story will be a familiar one to many watchers of the CPU wars of the past couple years, but things have improved for Intel for several reasons. The Extreme Edition 965's gravity-defying clock speed is one reason; although its performance per clock may be relatively weak in these types of applications, clock speed makes up for a lot. On top of that, the advent of multithreaded graphics drivers looks like it provides a real boost for the Extreme Edition 965 over its like-clocked P4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz counterpart. As a result, the 965 could be a credible choice as the centerpiece of a gaming system, with average and median low frame rates that are passable in our tests. Our seat-of-the-pants impression during our gameplay testing was reasonably good, as well. You could save several nice fistfuls of cash and get comparable performance by going with a low-end Athlon 64 X2 instead, though.