Benchmark Results: DiRT 2
With two gaming wins already under the mobile Core i7-2920XM’s belt, we were a little surprised to see the desktop Core i7-980X take a large lead in DiRT 2. Perhaps the game is optimized for threading, or maybe the larger L3 cache is positively affecting performance.
Increased detail levels shift a larger portion of the load to the GPU, and the Core i7-2920XM again passes the i7-980X. One architectural enhancement present on both notebook CPUs (as well as LGA 1155- and 1156-based desktop CPUs) is an onboard PCI Express controller, and its win at these GPU-bottlenecked settings most likely results from reduced PCIe latency.