Intel Core i5-661 Review - PAGE 9

Guitar Hero III is the widly popular game featuring a guitar-shaped controller. The player must hit the frets as they pass on the track on the screen. I used Fraps to monitor the of the song "Story of my Life" at hard difficulty.

Heroes of Might and Magic V is the fifth of the well known series originally developed by 3DO. The license is now held by Ubisoft and the game has been gifted with much more advanced graphics than the previous ones. Once again, I used Fraps to measure the first five minutes of the first campaign.

Left 4 Dead is a first-person shooter developed by Valve. It uses the Source Engine. Four survivors must fight against infected people in order to reach a safe area.

Both AMD's and Intel's integrated graphics bottleneck all three games, so the faster quad-core didn't provide any sort of advantage. We're solely looking at the IGP's performance here and, as surprising as it might seem, Intel compares very well to the 785G chipset, which was, up to this day, the fastest IGP. Intel struggles a bit in Guitar Hero III, where it performs slightly slower than AMD's offering running at stock settings, but still provides playable framerates. In the two other games, 785G is no match for Intel's Clarkdale although they perform similarly once overclocked to 800 MHz.