AMD Phenom II X4 940 

An off-the-cuff estimate, I'd say you pay 60% of the price for a Core i7 system and get 80% of the performance.

On May 29, 2007 Relic released a patch for Company of Heroes that supports DirectX 10 and we used the latest patch to test DirectX 10 game performance.

It was released for the PC, Xbox 360, and Playstation 3 on October 28, 2008 in the United States.

Socket AM3 processors will feature a hybrid memory controller that will work with DDR2 in AM2 and AM2+ boards and a DDR3 memory controller that will work in AM3 boards.

It was released on September 12, 2008 in the United States.

Both systems utilized the same graphic card and Nvidia's 180.84 drivers.

But even AMD concedes the improvement in IPC only aids overall performance by a few percentage points.

SiSoft's Sandra has become a mainstay in checking system performance while WinRar is a commonly used archiving tool.

Finally, the execution cores have been massaged with a view to releasing a few more instructions per clock, otherwise known as IPC.

Supreme Commander : Forged Alliance is a stand alone expansion for the real-time strategy game Supreme Commander and was developed by Gas Powered Games.

Assassin's Creed is a 3rd person stealth game that was developed and produced by Ubisoft.

Crysis is a science fiction first-person shooter computer game that was developed by Crytek, and published by Electronic Arts.

Tellingly, Intel has been through several radically different CPU architectures in that time, the latest of course being the ineffably awesome Core i7.

Super Pi isn't even a contest as it has favored Intel processors since Core Duo.

It is also a relatively cheap platform, compared to Core i7.