Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II

We are big fans of the Warhammer franchise, especially Dawn of War II. One of the latest RTS games in our library is also one of the more demanding titles on both the CPU and GPU. We crank all options to Ultra, enable AA, and then run the built-in performance benchmark for our result.

Gaming Performance - Dawn Of War II

Gaming Performance - Dawn Of War II

Far Cry 2

Featuring fantastic visuals courtesy of the Dunia Engine, this game also features one of the most impressive benchmark tools we have seen in a PC game. For single GPU results we set the performance feature set to Very High, graphics to High, and enable DX10 with 2xAA.

Gaming Performance - Far Cry 2

A surprising result, it seems the Clarkdale architecture is suited to Far Cry 2. Stock results surpass the i7-920 at 4GHz in this benchmark. We're not quite sure why this is the case, but the results are repeatable in this bench.

Resident Evil 5

For our final game benchmark we decided to add the Resident Evil 5's fixed time demo, running DX10, Ultra settings and 4xAA.

Gaming Performance - Resident Evil 5

Gaming Performance - Resident Evil 5

We're on a level playing field in this benchmark; there's a bit of scaling between 3~4GHz after which the Resident Evil engine is GPU bound.

In all three of these benchmarks, it's apparent that speeds higher than 4GHz on Clarkdale don't offer much in the way of frame rate scaling with an NVIDIA GTX 275 GPU. A more powerful GPU or an overclock of the graphics card would be required to see any gains from pushing the platform further.

Testbed Setup and Power System Benchmarks
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