Phenom II X3 720BE & CrossFire X Performance - Does it Compete?

Left 4 Dead

This game is a blast and addictive to boot - provided you like killing hundreds of zombies while trying to take care of your teammates and sustaining high blood pressure rates. What we really like about Source engine games is their ability to run well on variety of systems. We enable all options, set AA to 2x and AF to 8x, and play back a custom timedemo of a complete game session from the Runway chapter within the Dead Air campaign.

This title also favors the Intel processors. When comparing the 720BE to the X4 940 at 1680x1050, the 940 holds a 7% average frame rate advantage in single card mode, 4% in Crossfire, and a surprising 3% in the overclocked settings.  We matched our stock 720BE clock and NB speeds with the X4 940 to see if the extra core really makes a difference in this game with the multi-core rendering option enabled.  It actually did with the performance improvement averaging about 2% on this particular level.

Adding a second card for CrossFire operation improves average frame rates by 17% and minimum frame rates by 8% for the 720BE. Overclocking our 720BE by 35% resulted in a 19% improvement in average frame rates and 26% in minimum frame rates.

No real surprises here; the 1920x1200 results follow the pattern set at 1680x1050 for each platform. The X4 940 holds a 6% average frame rate advantage in single card mode, 7% in Crossfire, and 5% in the overclocked settings.  Adding a second card for CrossFire operation improves average frame rates by 14% and minimum frame rates by 27% for the 720BE. Overclocking the 720BE resulted in a 25% improvement in average frame rates and 21% in minimum frame rates.

Our game play experiences revealed no differences between the three platforms. Although the frame rates were lower with the Phenom II platforms, it just did not matter in this game as minimum frame rates were at 60fps or higher in our tests. The 720BE certainly offers more than enough processing power for this title.