System Builder Marathon, June 2010: $1,000 Enthusiast PC

Benchmark Results: Crysis And CoD: Modern Warfare 2

At first glance, the $1,500 Core i7-920 system is dominating the $1,000 Phenom II X3 720 build. But at very high settings, the overclocked/core-unlocked Phenom II system manages very similar performance compared to the stock Core i7 system at resolutions up to 1920x1080.

This is surprising when you consider that the Core i7-920 system has the advantage of two Radeon HD 5850 cards in CrossFire, compared to the Phenom II X3 720's dual Radeon HD 5830 card configuration. Perhaps there is something of a CPU bottleneck here (Ed.: I'd call it an I/O bottleneck, given that drive).

Call of Duty demonstrates a Core i7-920 advantage, but with all of the results above 70 frames per second (FPS), this advantage is somewhat academic. Even so, the overclocked/core-unlocked Phenom II X3 720 build manages to perform on par with the stock Core i7-920 system.