Gaming Performance
To kick start the gaming phase of this article we have Unreal Tournament. The Core i5 750 dominates the charts with 224fps at 1024x768 and 189fps at 1920x1200. Next best was the Phenom II X4 965 with 179fps at 1920x1200, making it roughly 5% slower. The performance then drops further going to the lower clocked Phenom II X4 processor, the 925, to 162fps at 1920x1200.
The Phenom II X3 720 delivers roughly the same result with an average of 161fps, making it slightly faster than the Core i5 650. The Core i3 540 matches the Athlon II X4 635 at 1920x1200, making both processors just a single frame faster than the Core 2 Quad Q9500. Surprisingly the Phenom II X2 555 beats not only the Core 2 Duo E8500 but also the Core 2 Quad Q8400.
When testing with Street Fighter IV we found that the Radeon HD 5850 created a bottleneck, particularly when testing at 1920x1200. The Core i5 750 easily defeated the Phenom II X4 965 at 1024x768, though with the GPU bottleneck the 1920x1200 performance was much the same on the majority of processors tested. Overall the 1024x768 results provided similar performance trends to those seen on Unreal Tournament 3.
When testing with Far Cry 2 we were unable to reach the limits of the Radeon HD 5850, though the Core i5 750 did set the benchmark with 81.3fps at 1920x1200.
The Phenom II X4 965 was the next fastest at this resolution with 75.1fps, followed by its slower part the 925 with 70.3fps. After that most of the processors rendered between 65-70fps. The Phenom II X3 720 and Core 2 Quad Q9400 both averaged 69fps, while the Core 2 Quad Q8400 and Core 2 Duo E8500 averaged 67fps.