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

3DMark06

3DMark06 still remains the number one utility used for a system benchmark. We find that it is mostly useful for tracking changes within a single system. There are four “mini-games” that it uses for benchmarking graphics, as well as two CPU tests. The scores are weighed and added together to give an overall “score” and there is a further frame rate breakdown possible with these mini-games that we are charting for you.

Here is a scene from “Canyon Flight” in 3DMark06, a mini-game which is used to benchmark performance. These tests will still give your PC a real workout even though its default resolution is only 1280×1024.  Here are the results of our 3DMark06 benchmark comparison using the benchmark at its default settings:

We see just scores; and now with the GTX 280

The results are just scores. Often a little variability will occur by just running the tests over and over. Now the mini-game frame rates with our HD 4870-X2:

Now the GTX 280 mini-game framerates:

As though we were ‘playing’ the 3DMark06 mini-games, we note the framerate rankings and note that all of our CPUs scale with the core clock increase.  If they were games, they would all be quite playable and they would be indistinguishable from each others platform.  So, let’s move on to our second synthetic benchmark, Vantage.