Gaming Performance
Although the Unreal Tournament 3 results at 1920x1200 placed little difference between the slowest and fastest processors tested, the 1024x768 results were more interesting to compare CPU performance.
The Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 managed 225fps, the AMD Phenom II X4 965 fired off 263fps. Then the Core i5 750 was able to average 268fps, making it slightly slower than the 273fps of the Core i7 920.
At 1024x768 the Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 managed 183fps in Street Fighter IV which would sound impressive if the Phenom II X4 965 wasn't scoring a whole lot better at 226fps. The Core i5 750 was faster again with 236fps.
Heavily overclocking the Core i5 750 resulted in a mere 3fps increase, so it would seem the standard 2.66GHz Core i5 750 configuration was nearing the limits of our GeForce GTX 285 graphics card.
Finally we have Far Cry 2, which we like to use as a gaming test platform because it is very demanding on both the GPU and CPU. As a result, even the 1920x1200 results differ quite a bit from processor to processor. When testing at this high resolution the Core 2 Quad Q9650 averaged 67fps, while the AMD Phenom II X4 965 was a bit faster at 70fps. The Core i5 750 scored a single frame per second better (71fps).