Gaming Performance
Because of the limited amount of time we had to test these new processors it wasn't possible to include newer titles for this review. We stayed with the basics, namely Unreal Tournament 3 and Far Cry 2.
Dual-cores fair very well in older games such as Unreal Tournament 3, though the performance advantage of the quad-core processors is still very apparent. The small frequency bump does not help the Phenom II X4 970 much and we found that it was still slower than the Core i5 750 and quite a bit slower than the Core i7 930.
The Phenom II X6 1075T is largely wasted in this game and as a result it was slower than both the Phenom II X4 970 and 965 processors. The Athlon II X4 645 delivered at an impressive level for a $99 processor, while the L3 cache of the Phenom II X2 560 gave it a noticeable performance advantage over the Athlon II X2 265.
The Far Cry 2 performance trends are remarkably similar to those seen on Unreal Tournament 3. The vast majority of the processors were able to average between 66 - 69fps at 1920x1200 when using the Radeon HD 5850 while just a few select dual-core processors were slower than this.