3.2G OC'd CORE i7 940 vs. 3.16Ghz Stock E8500 vs. 3.2Ghz Stock QX9770 Complete Review

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yup HL2 need cpu power like mad, try playing TF2 on a 32player server, anything below 3,5ghz -> welcome bleow 30fps.

@everybody that is whining

if you dont like what you see dont buy it, quite your whining about the price if you cant afford it, a stick to to cheap dual cores... i bet 2/3 of the people in this thread wont buy a nehelem the next 2 months anyway...

Hmm nah, on ZPS I sometimes drop to very little but I blame that on poor server code. My rig normally runs a 3.4GHz when gaming and since upgrading to 4870 (from 2900XT XF) I've noticed a massive drop in slow downs (except the first play on some maps, 2fort in the centre) in TF2 but now never below 40fps.

Anyhoo, I'm thinking of upgrading my CPU and the E7x00 class look very promising for price/performance. Once OC'd over 4.0GHz they'd probably still hold their own in anything less than a Tri-SLi or QuadFire setup or Crysis.

If UT3 is truely multi threading can you give us some max/min/avg fps data comparing 1, 2 ,3 & 4 cores enabled?

[JumpingJack]

If UT3 is truely multi threading can you give us some max/min/avg fps data comparing 1, 2 ,3 & 4 cores enabled?

I have that info, I will post it shortly.... probably one of the best multithreaded engines out there.

EDIT: This is core scaling using a Phenom 9850 at stock conditions. The asus M3A32-MVP has BIOS options for down-coring, i.e. you can choose in BIOS to do 1,2,3 or 4 cores active. The data was collected using UT3 patched to 1.1, an nVidia 8800 GTX (forceware 175.19), and 2 gigs of ram. The utility UT3Bench.exe was used to benchmark a perpecutal bot match of 12 bots for 60 seconds, using the Deathray DM map, at low settings (to extract the CPU performance), at 640x480 and 1280x1024 ... each 'core' setting and resolution was run 6 times, the value for each run is in the table, the average is also calculated. I ran at 640x480 vs 1280x1024 to show that this bench is CPU limited so it is testing the capability of the CPU.

The greatest jump goes from 1 core to 2, a smaller jump from 2 to 3 cores, and about even with 4 ... at the 3 core setting, all 3 cores show 100% in task manager, at 4 cores settings each is about 75% utilized, the overall utilization averages around 80% meaning UT3 is good for about 3.2 cores ...

The NR entry means that I accidentally miscounted the number of runs and for that series I ran only 5 instead of 6 runs... on average it did not affect the results greatly.



Jack

[RPGWiZaRD]

I have that info, I will post it shortly.... probably one of the best multithreaded engines out there.

Jack

Yea I concur this, I've seen results posted on 2 different forums regarding UT3 FPS multicore scaling tests. Still above 2 cores the difference starts become rather small, a gap of which a higher clocked dual core CPU that isn't as much fsb wall strangled as a quad is, can fill up quite well. But UT3 depends a lot on the CPU too that's for sure and I notice it particularly well since I'm only on a 19" CRT and using res 1280x960.

A bit offtopic but useful info regarding this game, I use this game to determine if my RAM & CPU is gaming stable too as it's better finding instability than even Orthos or memtest sometimes (not kidding). I had UT3 crashing on me randomly and wondered why since no other stress tests I used failed on me, but it turned out to be ram instability and now UT3 runs happily again.

[RaZz!]

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A bit offtopic but useful info regarding this game, I use this game to determine if my RAM & CPU is gaming stable too as it's better finding instability than even Orthos or memtest sometimes (not kidding). I had UT3 crashing on me randomly and wondered why since no other stress tests I used failed on me, but it turned out to be ram instability and now UT3 runs happily again.

the ut series games always were kind of picky about unstable ram/cpu. i've used the oldschool ut to test my overclocks on the old pentium3 450mhz

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A bit offtopic but useful info regarding this game, I use this game to determine if my RAM & CPU is gaming stable too as it's better finding instability than even Orthos or memtest sometimes (not kidding).

Thanks for the tip! Also, is there a simple way (switch/batch/config file) to launch it as a stress test?