Athlon II X4 635 and Phenom II X2 555 CPU Review

Fallout 3

Fallout 3 is based on the same engine used by The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and it is a DirectX 9.0c (Shader 3.0) game. To measure performance, we used the FRAPS utility running an outdoor scene at God mode, running through enemy fire, triggering post processing effects, and ending with a big explosion in front of Dupont Circle. First we tried to run this program at 1440×900 with all image quality settings at “low” with the motherboard on-board video enabled. Only AMD785G could run this program (achieving 20.35 frames per second); Intel G45 could not run Fallout 3. Then we installed a GeForce 9600 GT and ran this program with image quality set to “high.” The results for this scenario are presented below.

On Fallout 3 with a GeForce 9600 GT installed Phenom II X2 555 was 11% faster than Athlon II X4 620 and 9% faster than Pentium E6300. And Core 2 Duo E7500 and Athlon II X4 635 achieved the same performance level.