Intel Core i7 990X Extreme Edition Hex-Core Processor Performance 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 Intel Core i7 990X Extreme and the Intel Core i7 2600K continue the battle for the top spot in Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty. Running the scene we use to benchmark the Intel Core i7 990X averaged 164.724 frames per second while the 2600K was 3.527 frames per second or 2.1% faster at 1280×1024. At 1920×1080 the margin grew, the 990X averaged 134.627 frames per second while the 2600K averaged 140.542. That is a difference of 5.915 or4.4%.