Gaming Performance using Battlefield 2, Call of Duty 2 and Quake 4

Gaming performance is pretty respectable for the Pentium EE 955, with the chip being quite competitive with AMD's Athlon 64 X2 4800+.

The most interesting thing we found is that even with a high end GPU like the Radeon X1800 XT, a number of games are still quite GPU limited even at 1024x768, which is why you don't see F.E.A.R. and Splinter Cell: CT here. Even some of the games that we did required us to turn down some of the detail settings to start to stress the CPUs.

The pendulum often swings between games being CPU and GPU limited, and it seems that with the latest generation of games, we are definitely more GPU limited.

Battlefield 2

Battlefield 2 performance of the FX-60 is quite strong; however, the single core FX-57 is still able to hold a slight advantage over the newcomer. The performance difference isn't noticeable, but it is worth pointing out.

We should also mention that we had to re-run our AMD numbers in this test since the last review as we were seeing sub-par AMD performance. A clean install and re-run of the numbers yielded the results that you see today; the Intel numbers didn't change.

Call of Duty 2

Once again, Call of Duty 2 shows that the FX-60 is nipping at the heels of the FX-57, but not exactly outperforming it. That being said, our CoD2 test appears to be quite GPU bound even at 1024 x 768 with a X1800 XT, so the difference in performance here is minor at best.

We did run with SMP support disabled, as we found in our last article that the game gave us higher frame rates without it enabled.

Quake 4

For Quake 4, we turned to the latest 1.05 beta SMP patch, with SMP enabled, to give us these results. When more multithreaded games start shipping, you should see a performance breakdown similar to this, with the single core FX-57 not able to keep up with the new king of the hill: the FX-60.

Media Encoding Performance using DVD Shrink, WME9, Quicktime and iTunes Final Words
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  • Betwon - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    Yes, It is well known that P4 need more power than X2, but P4 is still able to overclock.
    While X2 need less power than P4, but both of them(anand & xbitlabs) find that they can't OC X2 any more (15X).
  • Betwon - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    In fact, those tests show that:
    X2 is overclocked in those benchmarks still slower then P4.

    We find the truth.
    Without OC:
    955 is 3.46GHz, FX-60 is 2.6GHz --> the ratio is 1.33 (3.46/2.6). -->In most tests, X2 is better than P4.

    OC:
    955 is 4.26GHz, FX-60 is 2.9GHz -->Now, the ratio is 1.46 (4.26/2.9). -->P4 starts to be better than X2.

    It is very simple:
    The ratio

  • flyck - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    quote:

    In fact, those tests show that:
    X2 is overclocked in those benchmarks still slower then P4.



    p4 wins one test the others it is way behind. you reversed it. p4 overclocked is still slower in those benchmarks.

    overclocked
    FX 2.8/ FX 2.6/ XE 4.266

    UT 2004 : 95.8 / 90.5 / 82.4
    Cinebench : 963 / 891 / 928

    only tests they did overclocked. p4 wins none of them. it is just edges above or around the normal FX 60.


    ow yeah your ratio... you have found a way for perfect scaling ? great, there will be people intrested....
    not even talking about the fact that your primary ratio is wrong because @ those frequencys p4 wins nonthing, so is not even equal. and oced is comes close it will probably win some and lose some (like in those 2 test) so then they are about equal.

    so the more accurate ratio will be 1.40-1.50. for equal performance. in which case p 4 should run above 4.5GHz before it has a noticeable gap over the FX60 overall.....
  • Betwon - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    P4 better than X2.
    Ratio is the key.

    The ratio below 1.33 -- P4 is behide.
    ratio above 1.4x -- P4 is competitive. Intel 4.26GHz VS AMD 2.9GHz

    For the ratio of intel 820 VS AMD 3800+ 165 170? see the benchmark of spec cpu2000 rates for 2 core 1 chip:
    The float point performance(under windows OS/32-bit):

    PD 820 SPECfp_rate_base2000 29.9 SPECfp_rate2000 30.0
    http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2005q4/...">http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2005q4/...
    170(939-pin 2GHz 1MX2) SPECfp_rate_base2000 25.2 SPECfp_rate2000 26.3
    http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2005q4/...">http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2005q4/...

    We don't find the benchmark of 165 and 3800+, but we find the benchmark of 175.
    170(939-pin 2.2GHz 1MX2) SPECfp_rate_base2000 26.2 SPECfp_rate2000 27.3
    http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2005q3/...">http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2005q3/...

    We don't find the benchmark of both PD and X2/opteron dc under windows OS/64bit, so we can not compare the dual-core float point performance 64-bit directly.

    The test--SPECfp_rate is the most important test for CPU float performance. AMD approbate SPECfp_rate for testing dual-core's FP performance.AMD think it is a fair test.
  • Betwon - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    Edit:
    175(939-pin 2.2GHz 1MX2) SPECfp_rate_base2000 26.2 SPECfp_rate2000 27.3
    http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2005q3/...">http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2005q3/...

    It is not 170.
  • flyck - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    ProLiant DL145 G2 (AMD Opteron (TM) 275) 2 cores, 1 chip, 2 cores/chip 30.3 32.4
  • Betwon - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    We find the 270(2GHz) FP benchmark of 32-bit under windows OS.
    http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2005q2/...">http://www.spec.org/osg/cpu2000/results/res2005q2/...
    270(not 939-pin ) SPECfp_rate_base2000 27.1 SPECfp_rate2000 28.3
    But PD820 SPECfp_rate_base2000 29.x SPECfp_rate2000 30.x
    better
    Now, ratio is 2.8/2=1.4.
  • Questar - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    You know, I pretty much favor Intel chips, but I still wish you stop your ranting.
  • Betwon - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    You know, I do not favor Intel chips, and I wish you stop your favor of Intel.
    Because we know the spec is not favor of Intel, and AMD knew it.
  • Betwon - Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - link

    rates
    275
    It is FP benchmark under 64-bit and Linux, but not the FP benchmark under 32-bit and windows.
    And 275 is 2.2GHz

    PD820 is 2.8GHz
    ratio: 2.8/2.2 = 1.22(only).

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