PCMark05, Far Cry 2 and Crysis WarheadTo get a better view on the CPU and therefore system performance I included PC MARK05 in here :
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Looking at just the CPU scores, not much difference hu ? But looking closer at the total scores, these seem to get a nice boost with the larger cache available. So overall sytem performance is a tiny bit better. Of course this is synthetic and might be hard to notice when (ab)using your PC.
Some Game benchmarks
I swapped the 9800GTX for a GTX 285 to avoid having a GPU bottleneck. Also I opted to test at 1024 and 1280 resolution as I wanted to clearly notice the influence of the CPU. I didn't test 800 resolution as hardly anyone uses it. AA and AF were also not selected in the benchmark tools.
FarCry 2 under the loop :
For max performance the larger cache CPU is a must. Far Cry 2 does like the extra cache and for sure the extra gains from a using higher FSB. It's nice to see such a new game title give high FPS with detail settings on high (although at lower resolution)
Crysis Warhead :
Apparently I didn't succeed to avoid having a GPU bottleneck here. Benchmark settings were set on Gamer level and on DirectX9. 1280 x 1024 is clearly GPU limited as any increase in CPU speed is not affecting the score at all. 1024 resolution test show that from 3.3Ghz on, we are again encountering GPU limitations. I could have retested Crysis maybe on a lower detail level but the E7400 seemed to be powerful enough to keep the framerate on par with the E8600.