Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Preview: The Desktop Gets a 1333MHz FSB

Gaming Performance

We're testing with a handful of new titles in today's review, many of which are far from CPU bound even at relatively low (by today's standards) resolutions. For our S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Supreme Commander tests we had to reduce the in-game resolution to 1024 x 768, while Rainbow Six: Vegas and Lost Planet both required 800 x 600 in order to produce measurable differences between these CPUs.

On the one hand, this is good news for those looking to build gaming PCs on lower end processors. On the other hand, it means that we have to test with less real world settings in our CPU reviews to accurately compare overall gaming performance of modern day CPUs. The CPU/GPU boundry pendulum will continuously swing from one end to the other, we're simply at a point today where even the almighty GeForce 8800 GTX can't run everything perfectly smoothly at 1600 x 1200.

As CPUs and GPUs converge, games will undoubtedly become even more compute bound, but it's difficult to predict what effect this will have (if any) on the balance between sequential and highly parallel general purpose processing.

Our first 3D game test is our walkthrough of Bruma in the popular RPG Oblivion. This test was run at 1600 x 1200 with Very High quality defaults selected from Oblivion's launcher. FRAPS was used in this benchmark:

Oblivion was one of the two benchmarks that showed a significant performance improvement due to the faster 1333MHz FSB. Looking at the E6420 vs. 5600+ comparison, AMD actually pulls ahead here thanks to its aggressive pricing.

We ran Half Life 2: Episode One at 1600 x 1200, with all settings at their maximum values with the exception of AA/anisotropic filtering, which we left disabled.

A small improvement for the 1333MHz FSB, and AMD continues to win the performance battle at ~$180.

We ran Prey at 1600 x 1200 with High Quality textures, all detail settings were set to their highest options, no AA, and 8X aniso:

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was tested at 1024 x 768 with full dynamic lighting enabled and high quality detail settings:

We ran Supreme Commander at 1024 x 768 with medium quality presets. We ran a subset of the built in performance test, specifically we only used the third performance test in the script as it was the most CPU bound.

Rainbow Six: Vegas proved to be particularly GPU bound, even at 800 x 600. We left most detail options enabled/high, with the exception of the eye effect setting.

Capcom's Lost Planet demo is available in both DX9 and DX10 flavors, but for this review we used the DX9 version given that we've not been able to find any real benefit to running the DX10 version. Just like RS:V, we had to run Lost Planet at 800 x 600 with a mixture of high/medium quality settings: