AMD Phenom II X4 920 and 940 review test -
Game performance - Crysis WARHEAD
Crysis WARHEAD
As in last year's game, expect to encounter dense jungle environments, barren ice fields, Korean soldiers and plenty of flying aliens. There's no denying that this is more of the same, except here it's a more tightly woven experience with a little less freedom to explore.
With a top-end PC (although Warhead has supposedly benefited from an improved game engine you'll still need a fairly beefy system). But rest assured, developer Crytek has enhanced more than just the graphics engine.
Vehicles are more fun to drive, firefights are more intense and focused, and aliens do more than just float around you. More emphasis on the open-ended environments would have been welcome, but a more exciting (though shorter) campaign, a new multiplayer mode, and a whole bunch of new maps make Crysis Warhead an excellent expansion to one of last year's best shooters.
Crysis Warhead has good looks. As mentioned before, the game looks better than Crysis, and it runs better too. Our test machine that struggled a bit to run the original at high settings ran Warhead smoothly with the same settings. Yet as much as you may have heard about Crysis' technical prowess, you'll still be impressed when you feast your eyes on the swaying vegetation, surging water, and expressive animations. Outstanding graphics. Couldn't say more here.
Crysis Warhead is new in our benchmark suite -- Our image quality settings. We opt for the gamers mode. However, we select DirectX 10 mode as well to allow way more hefty shader code which will take a heavy toll on the GPU, yet also frame buffer utilization.
- Level Ambush
- Codepath DX10
- Anti Aliasing 2xMSAA
- Ingame Quality mode Gamer
This setting equals "High" quality mode in the old Crysis. We could opt for enthusiast mode, but really... that mode is not yet ready for today's graphics cards. We up the ante a little more though, and apply 2 levels of anti-aliasing. Though we really wanted to push 4x AA here, we notice that current day graphics cards yet again run out of frame buffer and you'll notice the HDD activity going up a a lot.
Anyway, WOAAAAH, look at how close performance really is. On the lower resolutions the Core i7 processor is a few frames faster, and in the higher resolutions, the Phenom II Dragon platform.
And yes, overclocking does matter. We gain some more performance, but only up to 1280x1024 after which fastest single GPU based graphics card on the planet becomes a bottleneck, slows down and normalizes the framerate.
We test three AMD processors today, the Phenom II X6 1075T, Phenom II X4 970BE and Athlon II X4 645. They are part of the AMD Q4 processor product line update, arming their processor lineup with more value and higher performing CPUs.
AMD Phenom X4 945 and 955BE processor review|test
Today AMD is releasing two processors in the Phenom II line-up, the Phenom II 955BE and the Phenom II X4 945 processor. Both processors can be considered and positioned in AMDs high-end segment, yet will be priced friendly. Yields are good, clock frequencies go up, performance goes up. And that's nice as the Phenom II series processors offer great performance for the money you have to lay down on the table. AMD Phenom series processors are slowly ripening, and are aging like fine wine (they get even better over time). Guru3D brings you an in-depth performance review and architectural overview on both these processors. Oh yea .. and we'll overclock the living daylights out of it as well.
AMD Phenom II X4 810 and X3 720BE review (AM3)
A test on AMD Phenom II X4 810 and X3 720BE review socket AM3 processors. Socket AM3 Phenom II processors. Processors that are pretty much the same as the Socket AM2+ processors yet now with a DDR3 memory controller. DDR3 memory will allow the overall performance of the platform (your PC) to gain again a little in speed. Over the next few pages we'll tell you all about these new processors, their specifications and of course will check out performance.
AMD Phenom II X4 920 and 940 review test
AMD Phenom II 940 and 920 test. AMD releases the new Phenom II processors. Now manufactured at a much smaller fabrication processes, 45 nanometer, and has different amounts of cache. The result... their processors can now run at 3.0 GHz fairly easy, run cool and still have enough headroom for a nice tweak or two. Pretty significant, pretty interesting.