Intel Core I7 950 3.06GHz Quad Core Processor Review

Colin McRae: DiRT2

Colin McRae: DiRT 2 is one of the most anticipated racing games of the year and will take full advantage of DirectX 11, adding realism to the racing environment. The game also will have hardware tessellation that is said to improve the appearance of water and other surfaces, as well as crowd animations. Utilizing the EGO Engine, DiRT 2 should raise the bar for PC gaming and is a definite must-have for PC gamers as it will have cars and tracks twice as detailed as those seen in Race Driver: GRID. To test I use the high presets with no AA.

Benchmark Results: The Intel Core I7 950 fell right in the middle of the group of Intel Processors, which sounds right because it is faster than the Intel Core I7 930 and possesses less cores than the Intel Core I7 970. If you take a closer look however, the Intel Core I7 930 was able to outperform the Core I7 950, and the Intel Hex-core I7 970 had the lowest performance of the three.

Curious about how the AMD Phenom II X6 processors were able to out perform the Intel Core I7 processors in Colin McRae: DiRT 2. We decided to fire the game up in windowed mode and watch the CPU usage. The results were intriguing. Despite the hyper threading on the Intel Core I7 930 this particular game would only take advantage of four threads, while the AMD Phenom II X6 1055T had activity across all six of the cores. This is the reason that they were able to outperformed the higher priced Intel X58 system in this particular game benchmark, as Colin McRae: DiRT2 is clearly optimized to run on six physical cores.