SBM 3: High-End System

Benchmark Results

Our former system used two factory-overclocked XFX 8800GTX graphics cards in SLI mode, which were on loan from a third party. Today's system uses two standard-speed 8800GTX cards from Gigabyte, which raises an important question: can other improvements still boost the current system's gaming power?

3D Games

Doom 3 sees significant gains from the faster processor, where even the mighty Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 CPU appears to be the bottleneck at every tested resolution!

F.E.A.R. gets a performance boost from the faster CPU at most resolutions, where the higher-clocked graphics cards of the previous system only begin to catch up at 1600x1200 with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled.

Oblivion pulls graphics performance to its knees, so who would have thought the current system's faster CPU could have so much impact?

Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.