Legit Processor Reviews

Intel Pentium G850 Sandy Bridge 2.9GHz CPU Review

Manufacturer: Intel
Product: Intel G850 w/ PN: BX80623G850
Date: Mon, Aug 08, 2011 - 12:00 AM
Written By: Nathan Kirsch -
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Discrete Graphics Card Performance

AMD Radeon HD 6990 Video Card

We had a number of people e-mail in after our Intel Pentium G620 processor review and ask to look at discrete video card performance on these budget minded processors. We know slapping a super high-end video card like an AMD Radeon HD 6990 onto a sub $100 processor is silly, but that is what we did. We did this as this is dual-GPU is one of the most CPU hungry video card solutions on the market today! We installed the card into the test system and ran AMD Catalyst 11.8 Beta drivers for testing.

3DMark Vantage:

3DMark Vantage

3DMark Vantage is the new industry standard PC gaming performance benchmark from Futuremark, newly designed for Windows Vista and DirectX10. It includes two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests, several new feature tests, and support for the latest hardware. 3DMark Vantage is based on a completely new rendering engine, developed specifically to take full advantage of DirectX10, the new graphics API from Microsoft.

3DMark Vantage

The Performance settings were used for testing, so a resolution of 1280x1024 was used.

3dmark Vantage Benchmark Results

Benchmark Results: As you can see the performance of the AMD Radeon HD 6990 improved as the CPU's became faster.

HAWX 2:

Tom Clancy's HAWX 2

Aerial warfare has evolved. So have you. As a member of the ultra-secret H.A.W.X. 2 squadron, you are one of the chosen few, one of the truly elite. You will use finely honed reflexes, bleeding-edge technology and ultra-sophisticated aircraft - their existence denied by many governments - to dominate the skies. You will do so by mastering every nuance of the world's finest combat aircraft. You will slip into enemy territory undetected, deliver a crippling blow and escape before he can summon a response. You will use your superior technology to decimate the enemy from afar, then draw him in close for a pulse-pounding dogfight. And you will use your steel nerve to successfully execute night raids, aerial refueling and more. You will do all this with professionalism, skill and consummate lethality. Because you are a member of H.A.W.X. 2 and you are one of the finest military aviators the world has ever known. H.A.W.X. 2 was released on November 16, 2010 for PC gamers.

Tom Clancy's HAWX 2

We ran the benchmark in DX10 mode with the image quality settings set to low as you can see above.

Tom Clancy's HAWX 2

The H.A.W.X. 2 PC game title runs on what looks like five threads if the processor being tested has that many available.

Tom Clancy's HAWX 2 Benchmark Results

Benchmark Results: H.A.W.X. 2 showed a nice performance bump on the Radeon HD 6990 when moving up to the Intel Pentium G850.  It looks like that extra 300Mhz clock speed really does make a difference in the games.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat:

Stalker Call of Pripyat DX11 Performance Benchmark

The events of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat unfold shortly after the end of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl following the ending in which Strelok destroys the C-Consciousness. Having discovered the open path to the Zone's center, the government decides to stage a large-scale operation to take control of the Chernobyl nuclear plant.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat utilizes the XRAY 1.6 Engine, allowing advanced modern graphical features through the use of DirectX 11 to be fully integrated; one outstanding feature being the inclusion of real-time GPU tessellation. Regions and maps feature photo realistic scenes of the region it is made to represent. There is also extensive support for older versions of DirectX, meaning that Call of Pripyat is also compatible with older DirectX 8, 9, 10 and 10.1 graphics cards.

Stalker Call of Pripyat Advanced Image Quality Settings

The game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: CoP has no internal benchmarking tools built into the game engine, but they do have a standalone benchmark available that we used for our testing purposes. The screen capture above shows the main window of the benchmark with our settings. Notice we are running Enhanced Full Dynamic Lighting "DX10" as our renderer. Under the advanced settings we disabled tessellation, MSAA and ambient occlusion.

Stalker Call of Pripyat Advanced Image Quality Settings

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat looks to only be threaded for one CPU core as you can see from the Windows Task Manager screen capture that was done during a benchmark run.

Stalker Call of Pripyat Advanced Image Quality Settings

Benchmark Results: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat is a single threaded game, but performance scaled nicely once again with clock frequency!

Resident Evil 5:

Resident Evil 5

Resident Evil 5 is a survival horror video game developed and published by Capcom. Resident Evil 5 features similar gameplay to Resident Evil 4, with context-sensitive controls and dynamic cut scenes also making a return. The player can control Chris Redfield or Sheva Alomar in a similar fashion to Leon S. Kennedy in Resident Evil 4, with the same over-the-shoulder perspective.

Resident Evil 5

We ran the Resident Evil 5 benchmark in DX10 mode with all the image quality settings turned down, which just happens to be the default settings of the game.

Resident Evil 5

This game title runs on up to four threads as you can see from the task manager shot above that was taken on a test system that was running the Intel Core i7-2820QM processor.

Resident Evil 5 Benchmark Results

Benchmark Results: The differences between the processors in Resident Evil 5 was rather minor!

Next Page - Total System Power Consumption


Review Index
Page 1 - Intel Pentium G850 Processor Review
Page 2 - The Test System
Page 3 - CPU-Z, GPU-Z and Windows Index Score
Page 4 - SiSoftware Sandra 2011 SP3
Page 5 - x264 HD Encoding
Page 6 - CyberLink MediaEspresso 6.5
Page 7 - Handbrake
Page 8 - POV-Ray 3.7 RC3
Page 9 - Cinebench R11.5
Page 10 - PCMark 7
Page 11 - 3DMark Vantage
Page 12 - Resident Evil 5
Page 13 - H.A.W.X. 2 Benchmark
Page 14 - S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat
Page 15 - Discrete Graphics Card Performance
Page 16 - Total System Power Consumption
Page 17 - Intel Pentium G850 Temperature Testing
Page 18 - Intel Pentium G850 Overclocking
Page 19 - Final Thoughts and Conclusions