3D Games

Doom 3 shows the frame rate CPU limited at resolutions below 2048x1536. This game couldn't take advantage of additional cores, and the X6800 is Intel's fastest dual core. Overclocking may be the solution, but who needs hundreds of frames per second anyway?

F.E.A.R. shows the appropriate scaling with regard to resolution, where the graphics cards are the limiting factor. Even at 2560x1600 with 4x antialiasing and 8x anisotropic filtering, we get an average of 82 FPS.

Oblivion has a habit of slaughtering graphics cards in its outdoor scene, yet this build supported it all the way to 2048x1536 at an amazing 55 frames per second. Unfortunately, the game crashed in the outdoor scene at 2560x1600 pixel resolution.

Audio

Two minutes 29 seconds appears to be an impressive encoding time for converting a CD-length wave file to MP3, but we should wait until the final comparison article to decide whether it's fast enough to help justify this system's high cost.

Video

Even this X6800-powered system encodes DivX slower than real-time.

Applications

3D Studio Max shows a fairly significant performance boost compared to previous systems in this marathon, and that's likely 100% attributable to the faster processor.