AMD Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition Quad-Core Processor Review

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is a military science fiction real-time strategy video game developed by Blizzard Entertainment for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. A sequel to the award-winning 1998 video game StarCraft, the game was released worldwide on July 27, 2010. It is split into three installments: the base game with the subtitle Wings of Liberty, and two upcoming expansion packs, Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void. StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty has had a successful launch, selling three million copies worldwide in less than a month.

The game StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty has no internal benchmarking tools built into the game engine, so we recorded a scene and played it back at normal speed and measured performance with FRAPS. The screen capture above shows the system settings that we were using for StarCraft II. Notice we are running the graphics quality and textures set to Ultra and maxed out everything in the menu. We did not manually enable AA in the drivers though, as we wanted to keep testing simple and consistent to the choices offered in the games settings menus.

Benchmark Results: The results from Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty seem to favor the Intel Processors. Although, the higher clock speeds of the AMD Phenom II X4 980 Black Edition helped to edge out the AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition. At 1280×1024 the Phenom II 980 Black Edition was 6.231 frames per second faster than the 1100T. At 1920×1080 the Phenom II 980 Black Edition was 6.868 frames per second faster than the 1100T.