Gaming Performance

When testing with StarCraft II we were stunned to find that the Intel Core i5 2500K was able to just beat the Intel Core i7 975 EE. This made it 41% faster than the Core i5 750 at 1920x1200 and 71% faster than the Core i5 655K. The Core i7 2600K also managed to outperform the Core i7 975 EE by a slimmer 7% margin.

We decided to test the processors in games using settings gamers will actually use. That meant we inevitably had to run into GPU limitations when testing with Supreme Commander 2 and other titles. That said the dual-core Core i5 655K was considerably slower than the test of the pack and its clear that Hyper-Threading was not cutting it here.

The same GPU limitations were faced when testing with Battlefield Bad Company 2, though again we find that the Core i5 655K is slower than the test of the pack. At 2560x1200 the Phenom II X4 970 also suffered delivering only slightly more performance than the Core i5 655K.

Using the Civilization V late game benchmark we recorded the no render and full render scores. As you can see the Intel Core i7 2600K and Core i5 2500K processors performed exceptionally well in this test.