Phenom II X4 965 BE revision C3 review - Game performance - Resident Evil 5 | Far Cry 2

Resident Evil 5 (DirectX 10)

A new addition to our benchmark suite is Resident Evil 5. Capcom's newly released game ensures you a survival horror sequel that will let you bust up some zombies on your hard drive. Resident Evil 5 PC will support DirectX 9 and 10 along with ultra-high resolutions.

The game looks fantastic and has a built in benchmark. We test at DirectX 10.0 mode with 4x AA -- all settings are maxed out including BLUR activated. If you like to reproduce the benchmark scores yourself, then please select the fixed benchmark as we opted for a fixed time demo.

Resident Evil really surprised me though as it really likes multi-core processors, and especially hyper-threading ones it seems. Look at Intel's Core i7 940 take off there... dang (!), it might be a 500 USD processor but that really is shocking.

The 965BE processor, once overclocked on the MSI motherboard, definitely gains ground, but is nowhere even remotely close to the Core i7 processor.

As you can see, thanks to the extremely fast Radeon HD 5870 all AMD processors run into CPU limitation, except that Core i7 940. This is going to be a great title for testing the effect of a CPU on the overall framerate.

Far Cry 2

Throw your memory back to the year 2004 and the release of the innovative Far Cry on PC. Developer Crytek managed to fashion one of the most convincing and striking locales in all of gaming, and satisfied gamers with the freedom to pass through the landscape and tackle enemies in almost any way they saw fit. You surely remember Jack Carver and that things were about to get seriously messed up for you? Well, tough luck. You are no longer at that deserted tropical island but hop into a jeep and arrive at the sandy savannah surroundings of Africa. And that's a change... as much as you'll no longer run into any mutants, aliens, or any superpowers or psychic powers. Also - you are no longer Jack Carver, you assume the role of one of nine different mercenaries who are embedded in the midst of a brutal civil war which rages in an imaginary African nation.

Everything that goes down is involved in a dirty little bush war in central Africa and you'll have to use a rusty AK-47 and whatever bits of scavenged land mine you can duct-tape together. Two factions struggle for supremacy: the United Front for Liberation and Labour and the Alliance for Popular Resistance, and both are known for blood and control.

Far Cry 2 I like very much. Not so much for the gameplay anymore, yet the rendered environment and how the game can react to it. We are in high-quality DX10 mode with 4x AA (anti-aliasing) and 16x AF (anisotropic filtering).

Obviously again a victory for Core i7 940. But at 1280x1024 however, the GPU starts to max out and as such it's not really that CPU bound anymore. In fact, Far Cry 2 seems to be faster on an AMD chipset rather than a X58 chipset, once the processor is left out of the equation -- look at 1920x1080 and notice that the AMD platform (same graphics card / drivers / OS / configuration) is faster than the X58 somehow.

The reality is though that the Phenom II combo with this cheapo 80 EUR motherboard offers plenty of performance for your gaming experience.