Left 4 Dead

Publisher: Valve

Valve's epic new Zombie co-op shooter, Left 4 Dead, adds cutting edge new features to the Source engine, like subtle motion blur and film grain post processing when set to Very High detail which we've tested at. We also enabled multi-core processing and disabled VSync in the in-game options.


In a change from the norm for games, Left 4 Dead seems to love CPU cores rather than clock speed. Valve does include a "CPU multi-core" option which we enabled and it very much seems to benefit from it as the Phenom tri-core CPU outperforms everything by a few fps. The new Athlon X2 7750 and 7550 CPUs sit just below the triple core and also outperform every previous AMD CPU and both are a good few frames per second faster than the Intel E5200 - nearly ten fps in clock to clock performance.


Left 4 Dead still favours the tri-core Phenom over the rest with the Radeon HD 4830 installed, but by a smaller margin to the Athlon X2 7750 here than above. The same CPU extends quite a lead over the 7550 as well, while the Intel E5200 moves up the table to sit above the 5200, but still falls notably shorter than the new Athlon X2 CPUs.