X-bit labs

Cheaper Core Micro-Architecture: Core 2 Duo E4300 CPU Review (page 6)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 01/08/2007 | 05:21 PM ]

Gaming Applications

The Core micro-architecture shows its best in gaming applications. The junior Core 2 Duo models are far faster than the CPUs with the Intel NetBurst and AMD K8 micro-architectures here.

It is a special feature of gaming applications that they are sensitive to the bandwidth of the CPU-memory thoroughfare. That's why the Core 2 Duo E6300 has a bigger advantage over the Core Duo E4300 than in other benchmarks - the difference amounts to 6% in Quake 4 .

Besides the two games, we ran two benchmarks based on the Valve Source engine that is expected to be used in the upcoming Half-Life 3 . One benchmark shows the speed of processing the environment physics and the other measures the speed of creating lighting maps.

The Athlon 64 X2 4200+ is suddenly ahead of both CPUs with the Core micro-architecture in the environment physics test. Well, CPUs with the K8 micro-architecture are still very fast at modeling physical processes due to their high-performance FPU subunit.