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Our benchmarks are quite self-explanatory. Besides the usual benchmarks we included the Far Cry 2 Bench, which should only show the benefit of a faster CPU. If you have expected any Core i7 benchmarks here, we have to disappoint you. Because the Core i7 range requires DDR3 memory and very expensive boards, we don't see them as direct competition. Meanwhile the Q9550 2.83GHz has dropped to the same price level as the Phenom II 940. We don't have a Q9550 at hand, but at only 167MHz slower, a Q9450 should give you a good idea on how things perform.
As you can see the Phenom II is closing the gap against Intel's offer quite nicely. Sadly AMD has not improved the SSE units as much as we hoped, and as such still falls behind Intel when it comes to encoding and multimedia. When gaming you shouldn't notice any significant performance looses, but of course the faster the graphics card, the better.