While the lasting appeal of Blizzard’s popular StarCraft franchise is no doubt found within the multiplayer experience, I find the single-player campaigns well-designed, and always a worthy starting point. Rather than using our existing Wings of Liberty multiplayer map, I jumped into the Heart of the Swarm expansion and discovered that the "Harvest of Screams” mission was the first one capable of taxing my Core i5 gaming rig. This 60-second benchmark takes place as Kerrigan leads approximately 150 Zerg forces in to destroy the mission’s final Protoss base.
I purposely delayed my attack a couple of extra minutes to build up more Zergling than the mission required, plus I kept the game camera zoomed out and centered over the action. As a result, frame rates drop substantially as more and more units come into view, joining the battle. This may be considered overly brutal for your own style of play. After all, Core 2 Duo E6600 is the recommended processor requirement. But without a doubt, too little processor performance requires that you make compromises, whether you alter your strategy, zoom the camera in on fewer units, or totally avoid large-scale multiplayer maps.


StarCraft II is CPU-intensive, but unfortunately isn’t optimized for quad-core processors. Largely dependent on the amount of cache you can throw at it, Ivy Bridge-based processors appear to scale roughly 500-800 MHz ahead of the Core 2 architecture, leaving the Core 2 Quad Q9550 and Core 2 Duo E8400 at the bottom of our stack.


Cranking up graphics and texture quality for this second set of results yields frame rates close to how we'd expect to play this game with beefy graphics. Even so, it's clearly still CPU-limited.
- Old Vs. New: Six Intel Processors, Benchmarked
- Test System Configuration And Benchmarks
- Results: Synthetics
- Results: Audio And Video
- Results: Adobe Creative Suite
- Results: Productivity
- Results: Compression
- Game Testing Methodology
- Results: Borderlands 2
- Results: Crysis 3
- Results: F1 2012
- Results: Far Cry 3
- Results: Hitman: Absolution
- Results: StarCraft II: Heart Of The Swarm
- Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
- Results: Tomb Raider
- Overclocking: More Voltage, Higher Clocks
- Overclocking: 3D Game Performance
- Power Consumption
- Performance Summary
- How Do Five-Year-Old CPUs Hold Up Against Ivy Bridge?
Also, amoralman, did you read this? It's basically assuring you that your C2D is still awesome as a budget processor.
Also holy crap on 1.45 vcore on the C2D
I find it shocking that my E6600(which I still hold in high regard, is far far worse than a 50 dollar Celeron. My mind is blown.
That said, today's quads have a more efficient and better architecture than those of yesteryear, and the 3570K is a popular choice for enthusiasts.
intel made all their leaps forward with this architecture, and killed AMD in the process. And has never really moved past it... 6 years on and it still stands toe to toe with the latest and greatest.
I'm not that surprised really.
i have both and the 3570k is significantly faster than an e6600, i always had problems with the e6600 not being fast enough for my taste, its a night and day difference between the 2