Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz LGA 1366 Processor Review

Testing – Gaming
For gaming I chose three DX10 titles, Crysis, PT Boats: Knights of the Sea, and Call of Juarez. Again, I ran tests at stock clock on the i7 and C2D, and at my overclock on the i7.

Crysis:
Though it has been out well over a year, I still find Crysis the best benchmark for gaming systems. I don’t know of any game that puts so much stress on the CPU and memory, and still is very VGA intensive. It will find those system instabilities not found by Prime95, Sandra Burn-in, and the Futuremark series, especially in memory. It is my favorite test for testing overclocks. I used the Crysis Benchmark Test by Boris Vergiza, settings were: CPU Benchmark, DX10, High, AA x 2, 1280 x 1024.

crysis

PT Boats: Knights of the Sea:
PT Boats prefers a strong CPU and powerful video card. It has some tough camera angle changes that really lower FPS scores. I used the standalone performance test, settings were High, AA x 2, 1280 x 1024.

ptboats

Call of Juarez:
Call of Juarez requires a strong system for any kind of decent frame rate. I used the standalone demo benchmark, settings were: High, AA x 2, 1280 x 1024.

coj

Again, some significant numbers. Keep in mind, we’re not changing video cards, this is the same video card on a different system, and VGA power generally makes the most difference when looking at FPS. In other words, it usually takes some real CPU and memory differences to make much difference in game FPS. Here, in most cases we see some real FPS differences.