Real-World Gaming
Now try to forget for a second that the Core 2 Duo system using the powerful Radeon X1950XTX was 60% faster at 1600x1200. What is most relevant here is that the overclocked Athlon64 3800+ and GeForce 7900GS combo delivered playable performance at 1600x1200 in a very demanding game. Even without the overclocking, the Athlon64 3800+ still delivered 46fps at 1600x1200.
Another game that the budget gaming system does very well in is Prey, and as you can see the much cheaper AMD Athlon64 3800+ system was just 28% slower at 1600x1200. The overclocked Athlon64 3800+ processor and GeForce 7900GS graphics card also boosted performance by over 20% once again. Even without the performance boost from overclocking, the Athlon64 3800+ system was more than capable of delivering playable performance at 1600x1200.
The budget AMD Athlon64 3800+ system did surprisingly well in Quake 4 as the overclocked configuration was just 15% slower than the Core 2 Duo system at 1600x1200. Again, even without the added performance boost, the Athlon64 3800+ system does very well.
Many months ago, when we first benchmarked the Core 2 Duo E6700, we found that it really excelled in Unreal Tournament 2004. Given the age of this game, performance was never going to be an issue for either system and the standard Athlon64 3800+ setup produced 140fps at 1600x1200 with maximum in-game quality settings enabled.