Conclusion

With today's games it's no more possible to play smoothly using a Pentium 4. Even with the best graphics card on the market you wont be able to enjoy the latest games.

Never the less a four year old Core 2 Duo CPU is still up to date for a gaming system, but as you can see in the different comparision tables the Core i7 series can be up to three times more efficient. The average performance difference between a Core 2 Duo and a recent Core i7 CPU is between 60 to 70 percent depending on the benchmark. If you are still using a Core2Duo and want to upgrade your gaming rig then we strongly recommend you to upgrade your CPU first, the best choice if you haven't any i7 9x0 would be the i7 2600k which is more efficient and and also very competitively priced. For those who own a socket LGA 1366 Core i7 9x0 CPU, it's not worth to uprage to a Core i7 2600K. The improvement is within the single digit percentages and therefore upgrading the GPU will have a way bigger impact on gaming performance.
Never the less if your planning to buy a new system the LGA 1155 i7 2600K shows the highest efficiency and is also good value for money.

Author: Christian Ney, c.ney@ocaholic.ch Edition and translation: Christian Ney & Marc Büchel, m.buechel@ocaholic.ch

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 6 - 1920x1080 High Results - Theoretical
Page 2 - Specifications	Page 7 - 1920x1080 High Results - Gaming
Page 3 - Testing conditions	Page 8 - Average Results
Page 4 - 1280x1024 Medium - Theoretical	Page 9 - Conclusion
Page 5 - 1280x1024 Medium - Gaming

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