System Builder Marathon: Overclocking

3D Games, Continued

Supreme Commander is clearly a bottlenecked title, and appears restricted by both graphics card and CPU speed; we can see the high CPU over clock does little to increase speed across all resolutions, mainly boosting those settings that placed the lowest demand on the graphics card.

This title demonstrates a little more CPU dependency than usual. Perhaps the method of benchmarking, which includes a botmatch, is demanding of CPU resources to operate the artificially intelligent players.

Here is something we expected. Warhammer seems unimpressed with multiple CPU cores as we've seen in other situations, but a solid jump in clock speed really shows results.

While we have seen some gains in the games department, we're expecting to see even more mileage from our ~1 GHz overclock in real-world applications.

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