Chaos Theory was tested using the Lighthouse demo. The shader profile for SM2.0 was used, with parallax mapping and high quality soft shadows both disabled.
Chaos Theory showed a solid 5% performance gain at the lower resolutions, a stronger showing than what the flight simulations displayed, though the difference quickly disappeared to identical frame rates at the higher settings.
Call of Duty 2 was tested with a custom demo from the Prisoners of War single-player map. The game was configured in its DX9 rendering mode with all texture options manually set at high. And with the 1.0.1 patch, Call of Duty 2 has included multi-processing support.
Infinity Ward’s first-person WW2 shooter sees a modest performance increase at the lower resolutions, a difference quite similar to what was seen with the two flight simulations. Yet the frame rate delta quickly diminishes as the higher resolutions shift the performance onus onto the installed graphics board.
Synthetic Testing
Windows Media Encoder 9 was used for SimHQ’s content creation test. The application is a free download from Microsoft and greatly benefits from systems capable of accelerating its multithreaded design. Falcon 4: Allied Force’s intro movie, a 91 MB AVI file, was converted into a WMV file with high definition video and audio settings and the total time required by each processor to convert the file recorded. Shorter conversion times represent a better score for this particular test.
Corsair’s faster DIMMs don’t make too much of an impact in the conversion time of this file. The tighter timings reduced the time by 27 seconds in this test, which isn’t a significant difference at roughly 13 minutes total time.