Half-Life 2 is a popular franchise and we benchmark the video cards using Episode Two with the aid of HOC Half-Life 2 Episode Two benchmarking utility using the “HOC Demo 1” provided by this program. We ran the game in three 16:10 widescreen resolutions, 1680×1050, 1920×1200, and 2560×1600, under two scenarios. First with quality set to maximum, bilinear filtering and anti-aliasing set to x0. This configuration we are calling “low” on the charts and tables below. Then we maxed out image quality settings, enabling x16 anisotropic filtering and 16xQCS anti-aliasing. This configuration we are calling “high” on our charts and tables. We updated the game up to the June 9th 2008 patch. The results below are the average number of frames per second (FPS) achieved by each card.
Let’s test the Dark Knight Night Hawk Edition CPU cooler from Xigmatek. It has a black ceramic-coated tower heatsink, three 8 mm heatpipes and one 120 mm fan.
This time we tested Zalman CNPS 10X Extreme CPU cooler, which uses a tower design, five heatpipes and an amazing fan control system. Let’s see if it beats the coolers we already reviewed.
