Gaming — continued

Apart from competitive gamers obsessed with imperceptible levels of smoothness, few people actually play at low resolutions with modest in-game detail levels on a high-end system. To see what sort of impact memory speed might have with more realistic settings, we cranked the resolution to the highest level supported by the game with our 19" CRT monitor and pushed all in-game detail levels to their maximum. We also turned on 16X anisotropic filtering where available and enabled 4X antialiasing.

We're still looking at frame rates over 100 FPS with three of the five games we used for testing, but the performance picture has changed a little. The gaps are much smaller this time around, and in Crysis and Call of Duty 4, they're virtually nonexistent.

With both the Core i7-920 and the 965 Extreme, frame rates still improve when moving to faster memory in some games. These improvements are largely incremental, though, so I wouldn't get too excited.