Testing

To test the AMD chips we used the Asus Crosshair IV Formula motherboard which is based on the AMD 890FX chipset. This is a more expensive motherboard than the Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2H that we used for the Intel Pentium G6950, but both boards are excellent overclockers and allowed us to get the maximum performance from the CPUs on test.

Test Setup

Software

Below is a list of the applications we've used for our testing - most of them are available free for public consumption, although some are popular professional software applications.

• Crysis v1.21
  
• X3: Terran Conflict rolling demo v1.2.0.0
  
• WPrime v2.00
  
• Media Benchmarks v2007.235
  
• Maxon Cinebench 10 (x64)

We've used Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit, as this is the most flexible and reliable 64-bit OS for testing the applications above.

Hardware

• ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics card (Catalyst 10.5 WHQL)
  
• 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 hard disk
  
• PC Power & Cooling 750W PSU
  
• Asus Crosshair IV Formula motherboard
  
• Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2H motherboard
  
• 4/6GB (3 x 2GB) Corsair 1,600MHz DDR3 memory (CL9)
  
• Titan Fenrir TTC-NK85TZ CPU cooler