Quote Originally Posted by gosh View Post
The big problem is that there is so very hard to find test that somehow is checking this problem. You need to compare one slow and one fast processor on high res with one very fast video card. The speed can’t be hindered by the processor speed or the video card. Best would be to compare one slow AMD Phenom ( 9550) with a good motherboard, now that these 790GX is coming that would be very interesting to compare, with one very high clocked Intel and a very fast Video Card. Then you have one solution that has very strong I/O but the processor isn’t that fast. Another solution that has very strong processor but I/O and memory transfers isn’t that fast. Checking the behavior on these computers would say a lot on why things happens.
and thats the problem with that review, they are using a 8800gt, and this should mean they should see serious drops in res above 1650x1050, yet there are some total inconsistent numbers (there are a lot more in that review, then the few i have pointed out.)

Quote Originally Posted by gosh View Post
What happens if a game is multithreaded or there are some other threads in the background of a game? That thread is set to high priority and does some memory intensive thing. Remember that the only path C2D and C2Q has to communicate with other hardware is the Front Side Bus. That traffic is probably controlled by hardware but it could be that two threads is located on the same core, other threads could also be waiting for one thread to get ready.
most games arn't really memory bandwidth hungry. Thats why you only see a very low increases in fps (even on the amd platform) when you use faster ram.
I also play games and do some crunshing (rosetta) at the same time, but i never noticed any slowdowns while i play games, not on SC or crysis.

As said in aother thread, this review needs some deeper digging and some crosschecking.