A new addition to our benchmark suite is Resident Evil 5. Capcom's newly released game ensures you a survival horror sequel that will let you bust up some zombies on your hard drive. Resident Evil 5 PC will support DirectX 9 and 10 along with ultra-high resolutions.

The game looks fantastic and has a built in benchmark. We test using DirectX 10.0 mode with 4x AA -- all settings are maxed out including BLUR activated. If you'd like to reproduce the benchmark scores yourself, then please select the fixed benchmark as we opted for a fixed time demo.

Resident Evil really surprised me though as it really likes multi-core processors and especially massively multi-core hyper-threading ones it seems. As you can see, thanks to the extremely fast Radeon HD 5870 Core i5 600 is working well, but nowhere close to a four core Core i7 processor unless highly overclocked.

** Update the Core i7 940 seems to be invalid -- please ignore that entry for Resident Evil 5.

Far Cry 2

Throw your memory back to the year 2004 and the release of the innovative Far Cry on PC. Developer Crytek managed to fashion one of the most convincing and striking locales in all of gaming, and satisfied gamers with the freedom to pass through the landscape and tackle enemies in almost any way they saw fit. You surely remember Jack Carver and that things were about to get seriously messed up for you? Well, tough luck. You are no longer at that deserted tropical island but hop into a jeep and arrive at the sandy savannah surroundings of Africa. And that's a change... as much as you'll no longer run into any mutants, aliens, or any superpowers or psychic powers. Also - you are no longer Jack Carver, you assume the role of one of nine different mercenaries who are embedded in the midst of a brutal civil war which rages in an imaginary African nation.

Everything that goes down is involved in a dirty little bush war in central Africa and you'll have to use a rusty AK-47 and whatever bits of scavenged land mine you can duct-tape together. Two factions struggle for supremacy: the United Front for Liberation and Labour and the Alliance for Popular Resistance, and both are known for blood and control.

Far Cry 2 I like very much. Not so much for the gameplay anymore, yet the rendered environment and how the game can react to it. We are in high-quality DX10 mode with 4x AA (anti-aliasing) and 16x AF (anisotropic filtering).

Again a victory for the X58 combo with Core i7 940. The reality here again is that after 1280x1024 the GPU starts to matter more, it will max out and as such it's not really that CPU bound anymore.