Testing – Gaming
Normally with gaming you are not going to see a large increase in performance when upgrading a CPU. This is because your GPU is going to be doing most of the work. We are going to start with synthetic tests, up first is the latest release of 3DMark. We ran the Fire Strike benchmark.
Up next is 3DMark 11 which was run on the extreme setting.
Finally onto a real game, Alien vs. Predator. When configuring Alien Vs. Predator, we used the following settings: Textures: Very High, Shadows: High, Anisotropic Filtering: 16x, SSAO: On, Tessellation: On, DX11 Advanced Shadows: On, MSAA: 0x.
As you can see not much of a difference when it comes to real gaming between the two processors.
So far 4.6Ghz looks like the average, the older models averaged around 4.4Ghz; Overall it’s an acceptable improvement for a refresh that does not include a price increase.