TechSpot - PC Technology News and Analysis

Unreal Tournament 3 clearly benefits from the additional cores and as a result the quad-core AMD processors do very well. The Phenom II X2 550 pleasantly surprised us also delivering 19% more performance than the Core 2 Duo E7400. The Athlon II X2 250 on the other hand was able to outperform the Pentium E5400 by a small margin at 800x600. Interestingly it was also faster than the E7400 at 1920x1200.

Although Crysis Warhead did not care for the AMD quad-core processors, the Phenom II X2 550 was at the top of its game, once again defeating the Core 2 Duo E7400. The Athlon II X2 250 also did well matching the Pentium E6300.

Far Cry 2 is quad-core optimized and this was most evident at 800x600 where the GPU speed doesn't play a role. The gaming performance of the new AMD Phenom II X2 550 and Athlon II X2 250 processors was again exceptional with both beating the Core 2 Duo E7400.