XBIT LABS has a two part article entitled Games against CPU where performance in games like Battlefield 2, FEAR, Serious SAM 2, Quake 4 and COD2 are assessed.
28 processors are put on test, overclocked and dissected. AMD rules the game as usual, even an overclocked 4.2GHz Pentium 4 cannot pull ahead significantly compared to a non overlocked FX57. The
second part pays more attention to the performance of budget processors - which should be of interest to more than a few of us. No surprise here as the Celeron D gets stomped, battered and destroyed by the challenge of the Sempron. Bear in mind though that the test bench used a 7800GT and 2GB memory which probably be the staple entry level PC.
AMDzone has the first test of the new
Opteron 165 which takes over the crown as the cheapest Dual Core processor from AMD.
At $290, this Toleco Core CPU, destined to the server market, is bound to be a pipping hot seller due to the fact that it is a socket 939 part and therefore no longer needs registered memory. It might be running at only 1.8GHz, but with a full MB of memory per core, it looks like a Dual Core Turion ;-) Chris manages to overclock it up to 2.5GHz using the Thermalright XP-90c, arguably one of the best coolers out there. Benches to come later.
AMDzone has also learnt about a full line up of seven new Opterons available for purchase, both single and dual cores. PC Perspective invites us to read its review of the
x16 SLI enabled Asus A8N32-SLI nforce 4 motherboard, one of the few such boards out there. Marketed as a top of the range motherboard, it comes with enough features to compete with most 955x motherboards out there. Rockstable, Overclocker friendly and future proof. Additionally,
PCperspective points to some news about incompatibilities between the Creative's X-Fi and the Nforce 4 which can only be fixed either by upgrading the motherboard or chaging the sound card.
The INQuirer
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