Core i7 vs. Penryn vs. Phenom II with HD 4870-X2 & TriFire

PT Boats: Knights of the Sea

PT Boats: Knights of the Sea is a stand-alone DX10 benchmark utility released by Akella last year. It is actually a tech demo of their upcoming simulation-action game. This DX10 benchmark test runs reliably and apparently provides very accurate and repeatable results.

We set the only settings options available to us as follows:

DirectX Version: DirectX 10

Resolution: 1920×1600 and 1680×1050 at 60 Hz

Image Quality: High

Anti aliasing: 4x

Here are the results of the PT Boats DX10 benchmark, first at 1920×1200:

Now at 1680×1050 resolution:

We note that with our HD 4870-X2, we see the stock Phenom II lagging a bit behind the Q9550S and Core i7 – until it is overclocked. Strangely, our Core i7 seems to have the worst minimums. It could be driver issues or perhaps more likely to do with i7’s hyper-threading. We feel that most users with i7 will not do any adjustments in their BIOS just to play games, so we left hyper-threading on for all of our current testing. We have begin to test with it on versus off and have noted that hyper-threading is an issue with some games. With our single GPU, GTX 280 in the last review, there was no practical difference running PT Boats on any CPU. With this one, we see Tri-Fire taking advantage of faster CPUs to produce higher averages and maximums.