High Performance Gaming on a Budget: Athlon II vs. Phenom II vs. Q9550S

Conclusion

This has been quite an enjoyable exploration for us into comparing our Core2Quad Intel PC with Athlon II 250 X2, Phenom II 550 X2 and 720 X3 with our benchmark suite.  We hope to continue to expand on it in the weeks to come with perhaps Phenom II X4 vs. Intel’s newest value platform – Core i5.

As you can see from our benchmarks, if you want absolutely the very fastest framerates with your HD 4780-X2 or your GTX 280 – and cost is no object – you will chose the fastest quad-core CPU you can afford and overclock it as far as you can.  We also see that as your video card gets more powerful, generally your CPU needs to also be progressively faster to match it.  We noted that there was generally less difference with varying clockspeeds and the amount of CPU cores needed with our single GTX 280; often the differences were magnified by using HD 4870-X2.  So, future and more powerful video card purchases should be considered whenever you upgrade your CPU.

Of of our fourteen gaming benchmarks, only World-in-Conflict seems to really benefit from a quad-core.  However, to balance it, Enemy Territories: Quake Wars is generally faster with our test setup with the AMD CPUs than with Intel’s.  The rest of the dozen benchmarks demonstrate that all of our CPUs all run fairly close performancewise and satisfactorily once they are overclocked to approximately 3.5 GHz.  Our conclusion would have us believe that the videocard is the single most important factor for dermining most game’ framerates at maximum detail.  As long as there is a decent dual-core or tri-core, one is not really losing much by not having four CPU cores – other than bragging rights – in most games.

We intend to return again to this subject in a few months, especially as more games are optimized for multi-core CPUs.  We are only about half-way done with our Value series and you can expect to see reviews from us covering Cooler Master’s Hyper N212 Universal CPU cooler and Silent Power 600 M as we continue to build our AMD PC and test it against our Intel PC.  We will update to the latest drivers as we continue on reviewing our AMD Gigabyte 8x+8x PCIe CrossFire motherboard and also in optimizing our CPU overclocks.  Stay tuned.  The fun has just begun.

In the meantime, feel free to comment below, ask questions or have a detailed discussion in our ABT forum. We want you to join us and Live in Our World. It is fast expanding and we think you will like what you progressively discover here.

Mark Poppin

ABT Senior Editor

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