by John Reynolds Introduction Announced by Intel in September, the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 quad-core processor was originally slated for debut in 1Q, 2007. Yet the company has decided to aggressively follow their Core 2 Duo launch by moving up the release of their first quad-core CPU to this fall. Rumblings of an imminent announcement […]
by John Reynolds Introduction The Radeon X1950 XTX is something of a milestone, the last DirectX9 graphics board from the company, ATI, that ushered in DX9 GPUs with the release of the Radeon 9700 Pro over four years ago. With the upcoming release of Windows Vista and its inclusion of DirectX10, the market is duly […]
Back To Page 1 The Profiler (Z Engine) Once I finally got the Z engine program working on my system, it is a thing of beauty — except for some screw up programming decisions. It puts a nice icon in your tray, green meaning it’s working, red not. You can “Right Click” and open […]
by Chuck “Magnum” Ankenbauer Introduction I’ve always liked the zBoard concepts, but never got one because I’m a left handed gamer. That means I use my mouse with my left hand, and reprogram all my games to use my Num Lock keys for movements and action. I was browsing GoGamer one day for those occasional rare PC imports […]
Back To Page 5 Call of Duty 2 was tested with a custom demo from the Prisoners of War single-player map. The game was configured in its DX9 rendering mode with all texture options manually set at the highest setting of extra. And since the 1.0.1 patch, Call of Duty 2 has included multi-processing support. […]
Back To Page 4 Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2004 was configured with high settings enabled across its four display panels, with the max texture slider set at full and hardware lights at four. SimHQ’s demo is a short dusk flight over Hong Kong city. FS2004 again shows an amazing performance delta among the tested processors, with the […]
Back To Page 3 Game Benchmark Scores As a watershed title for multi-processing support, SimHQ enjoys making heavy use of Falcon 4: Allied Force for dual-core testing. The two mission tests that are used in this article can be found here and the simulation itself was patched with the 1.0.7 update. Because of the rather aged nature of […]
Back To Page 2 Synthetic Testing Windows Media Encoder 9 was used for SimHQ’s content creation test. The application is a free download from Microsoft and greatly benefits from systems capable of accelerating its multithreaded design. Falcon 4: Allied Force’s intro movie, a 91 MB AVI file, was converted into a WMV file with high […]
Back To Page 1 Test Systems Setup Intel System Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93 GHz) Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.67 GHz) Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 955 (3.46 GHz) Intel D975XBX motherboard (975X chipset) AMD Socket AM2 AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 (2.8 GHz) ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe (nForce 590 chipset) All three test setups shared the […]
by John Reynolds Introduction A funny thing happened on Intel’s way to 10 GHz desktop processors: the company failed to arrive even halfway at that goal. Yet without delving too deeply into the bumps Intel’s NetBurst architecture stumbled and stalled over on its road to longer pipelines and higher clock frequencies, the Pentium desktop platform […]
Back to Page 3 SimHQ also decided to throw somewhat more extensive multitasking testing into the mix to see how these dual core architectures differentiate themselves. Futuremark’s PCMark05 multithreaded tests runs run multiple processes simultaneously, with Test3 running four separate threads (file compression and encryption, a virus scan, and a memory latency test), making it a […]
Back to Page 2 Chaos Theory was tested using the Lighthouse demo. The shader profile for SM2.0 was used, with parallax mapping and high quality soft shadows both disabled. Chaos Theory showed a solid 5% performance gain at the lower resolutions, a stronger showing than what the flight simulations displayed, though the difference quickly disappeared […]
