Synthetic Gaming Performance
Though we’ll look at real-world game testing quite a bit later in the review, these results show some real potential for eight-core gaming. The 3DMark06 score shows an 800 point jump while the CPU tests show 40% and 22% improvements going from four cores to eight.
These Valve tests are also pretty theoretical in nature, but interesting to see in any event. The first result shows the CPU working on physics processing in the Valve engine, and the Skulltrail platform beats out the QX9770 by 10% or so – not a big jump but it is something. In the map compilation results though, the Skulltrail platform looks like it is overkill – the slower memory is probably at fault for keeping it slower than the quad-core based Intel QX9770 and QX9650 processors.
