Phenom IIs and World In Conflict as a benchmark

[Uriel]

Until recently I'd seen a number of benchmarks where minimum framerate in World In Conflict with Very High IQ is a lot lower than on i7 systems (say 15-20 frames on the pIIs, rather than 30+ on the i7s).

For example: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1195/9/

I'd seen that overclocking the northbridge and tweaking RAM timings is capable of bringing PII performance closer to i7 levels.

For example: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-cpu-overclock,2396-7.html (note differing resolution)

But here's an example where a stock Phenom II 965 is getting the same sort of framerate as the i7s: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=879&type=expert&pid=8

What's going on? The only thing that I can see that's much different about the setup is that it's using a DDR2 setup with fairly tight timings. Anyone spot something I've missed? Am I reading too much into results from different sites?

Edit: there are different GPUs in there I suppose. They do badly with an HD5870 and on par with the i7s with GTX285. Can't be that - surely!?!

 

[mmj_uk]

Basically it boils down to the fact that you shouldn't use games which are 90% reliant on GPUs to compare the performance of CPUs, it's impossible to gauge how much of an influence the 3D engine/GPU is having on the result, if you want to compare difference CPUs use something like CineBench.

In terms of games you don't really need a very fast quad core as most games aren't anywhere close to maxing out the CPU.

 

[mmj_uk]

Until recently I'd seen a number of benchmarks where minimum framerate in World In Conflict with Very High IQ is a lot lower than on i7 systems (say 15-20 frames on the pIIs, rather than 30+ on the i7s).

For example: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1195/9/

Phenom II 940 is a 3ghz quad.

I'd seen that overclocking the northbridge and tweaking RAM timings is capable of bringing PII performance closer to i7 levels.

For example: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-cpu-overclock,2396-7.html (note differing resolution)

Yes the i7 gains from Uncore (L3 cache) overclocking also but it's already fast enough to be bottlenecked in most games.

But here's an example where a stock Phenom II 965 is getting the same sort of framerate as the i7s: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=879&type=expert&pid=8

What's going on? The only thing that I can see that's much different about the setup is that it's using a DDR2 setup with fairly tight timings. Anyone spot something I've missed? Am I reading too much into results from different sites?

The Phenom in this review is 400Mhz faster than in the first and all tests are run at very high settings which brings in GPU/engine limitations.