System Setup

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
Intel Core 2 Duo E8600

ASUS P5E3 Premium

4GB (4x1GB) OCZ DDR3 PC3-16000 Platinum

Intel Core i7 920 w/Turbo Mode Enabled

ASUS P6T Motherboard

3GB (3x1GB) Qimonda 1067 CL7 non-ECC

AMD Athlon X2 6000+
AMD Phenom X4 9950 Black Edition
AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition

MSI DKA790GX Platinum

4GB (4x1GB) OCZ DDR2 PC2-8500 Platinum

ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2
Catalyst 8.12

500GB Western Digital Caviar SE16

Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit w/Service Pack 1

Benchmarks

Lost Planet
Left 4 Dead
Crysis
Far Cry 2

Notes

For all of our previous CPU tests we’ve relied on NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 280 as the GPU used for testing. With a new year though we wanted to crank things up a bit, opting for ATI’s Radeon 4870 X2. By moving to a dual GPU card, we’ll be pushing the capabilities of these CPUs further, plus it prevents us from hitting the GPU-limited situations we’ve encountered previously with high quality settings at 1600x1200 and 4xAA. In all of our previous CPU reviews the GPU has always been a bottleneck in this situation, so by stepping up to a dual GPU card we were hoping to alleviate this.