Core i7 975 review

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Game performance - BIA:HH

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway

Hell's Highway, another WWII shooter some might say. But in reality the setting of war is really just a vehicle for Gearbox to tell the storyline of a Band of Brothers which is led by you, Sergeant Matt Baker, as they deal with the madness and consequences of war. The game tells the story of Operation Market Garden in the country yours truly lives, in the Netherlands (aka Holland). It's about the besieged journey from Eindhoven to Arnhem where tremendous battles were fought.

Exactly that road, Highway 69; the road from Eindhoven to Arnhem was later nicknamed: Hell's Highway.

On of the most impressive details is that the area of Operation Market garden was completely reconstructed by historical documents and images. It's uncanny to see and experience the design of 1944 Holland. Even now in 2008 you can still see striking similarities of our country. Street signs, building structures, clothing, and even the clinker bricks on the roads dispense a true authentic mood. This reviewer is Dutch, so what level would be more appropriate than one of the starting levels, in a field in the Netherlands, moving towards a large windmill ahead of us. Lots of geometry is to be found here and in fact one of the more complex scenes to render for the GPU. Yes, welcome to Holland.

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway is an interesting title as it is using the Unreal 3 graphics engine. That engine is multi-core optimized. And this is the one title that really diggs faster processors, or processors with more cores. As such we see a phenomenal win for Core i7, both the Phenom II 955BE and Core 2 Quad QX 9770 are CPU limited.

No AA is enabled in this game, meaning there's some more CPU headroom to show off.

  • Texture Quality HIGH
  • Shadow Texture Quality HIGH
  • Shadow Detail HIGH
  • Vsync OFF

By the way we use high detail image quality settings. We test in a real life situation, the way you play the game at home.

As stated no AA is enabled, as the game does not support it. Meaning we have a much lesser GPU bound situation. once we overclock to 4 GHz, we see only a small increase of performance at the lowest resolutions. Here the GPU is becoming the limiting factor clearly.

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