Crysis

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Crysis is seen by many as the poster boy for DirectX 10 and it will make your system quite literally fall over crying if it's not up to – it’s a monster of an engine! It doesn’t come as much of a surprise then, that the graphics are something special – they’re above and beyond anything we’ve ever seen in a PC game even still. We used the latest 1.21 patch and range the game in 64-bit and DirectX 10 mode in a custom level run through.


In Crysis the relative CPU value of the highly overclocked E8400 at 4GHz is a clear winner here - with the performance of DDR3 taking the crown although DDR2 isn't far behind. With a full 36-40 percent better price : performance margin the dual core E8400 compared to the baseline Phenom X4 9750. The Q6600 with DDR2 and DDR3 isn't far behind in the mid-20 percent range, and even the stock E8500 is a positive +20 percent value.

While the Core i7 920 at 4GHz is undoubtedly faster than the Phenom X4 9750, but since the i7 920 costs $284 versus $164 for the Phenom X4, the offset in price only affords it to a 3 percent better value in price : performance stakes.

Without overclocking the other Core i7's don't provide anywhere near as good value here either - the i7 920 at only 2.66GHz loses about 10 percent in value but the more expensive i7 940 and 965 drop a significant amount.

Interestingly, despite the fact that we all know the Core 2 Quads perform better than AMD Phenom X4s, the AMD's turn out to be really great value CPUs simply because of their price. They don't drop that many FPS so AMD has priced them to be better value.


The DDR2 platform value for the E8400 and Q6600 overclocked is clearly the best here, but then, we knew that already right? The Phenom X4 9850 OC also has a great value, but it matches the E8500 not overclocked with DDR2 and I know which I'd prefer for gaming (the Intel).

Again the AMD machines with their cheap motherboards, and DDR2 make for great value platforms and clearly the performance advantage of the Core 2 and Core i7 CPUs just simply isn't enough to make them "better" value here considering their platforms cost more unless they're heavily overclocked. Even the Core i7 920 at 4GHz is still 4 percent lower value than the AMD machines in price : performance.