[H]ard|OCP reviews Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93ghz) and Core Duo E6700 (2.66ghz) processors
Let's just cut to the chase. You will see a lot of gaming benchmarks today that just simply lie to you. That is right, you will see frames per second numbers that are at best total BS, and at their worst a terrible representation of what difference a new Intel Core 2 processor will make in your gaming experience. The old ways of video game benchmarking do little to tell you about exactly how a new CPU will affect how you play your games or what experience your system supplies to you. Having more CPU power is a very cool thing, but being able to utilize it is not an easy thing to do nowadays.
This article is specific to gaming, so if you are wondering about synthetic or video and music encoding and Core 2, we have covered that as well in a separate article. Be sure that HardOCP is supplying you with the definitive information you need in order to plan your next upgrade when it comes to investing in a system to play games on.
We started out with high hopes of using NVIDIA's new GeForce 7950 GX2 video card with our new Core 2 Duo and Extreme processor. This would allow us to use "SLI" on motherboards that did not have NVIDIA SLI chipsets, and it would allow us to use what is easily the world's most powerful single slot gaming GPU. The thought behind this was that we could remove the GPU from being the bottleneck in our testing, or get as close to that as is possible nowadays. Sadly, we ran into some issues, due to the product's immaturity, and therefore we have used a single GeForce 7900GTX. While this is not what we wanted to do, it still is a graphics powerhouse to be dealt with, as you will see. Hopefully, a simple BIOS fix to our ASUS P5B Deluxe test system will solve the GX2 issues soon...
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