Boo to Gamespot again for a sub-standard, half arsed performance guide. Once again, what happens if you're a GeForce and AMD owning gamer? Why no X2 performance and why no test of the Intel chips on XP? I really get no idea of whether the performance boost in the page one graphs is coming from the GPU or CPU...

I for one am pleased to see a cheap quad-core that holds it's own at stock settings against the nearest Intel competitors. 10 - 20 fps is a small performance hit for a $200 saving especially when you're looking at benchmark scores above 100fps (See UT3 test) And the 9600 actually out-performs the E6700 in all but the UT3 test, brilliant for gamers on a budget! Where I see these chips doing well will be in the already installed user base of AM2 socket owning gamers looking for a relatively pain free upgrade. It'll be nice to see if they drop a chip with a higher clock speed than 2.6ghz any time soon though, not sure I can be bothered switching from my 5200 just yet.

I never really understand Gamespot's test set ups, for example, why can't we have an Athlon rig with a GeForce 8 series card in the tests? I dunno, they always seem to be somewhat haphazard, surely you'd expect to see lower results on lesser systems. Where's the Athlon X2 5200 performance to compare to the E6600? Plopping the Core 2s up there with more efficient GPUs smacks of bias to me.

My benchmark results on AMD 5200 2.99ghz, 4gb Corsair XMS2, Asus GF8800GTX @ 1440x900, Vista Home Premium - Very High - 17fps High - 32fps Personally, I'm quite content with my High results... perfectly playable for me... but like Far Cry before it, I can look forward to enjoying an equally beautiful game a year or more down the line 'cuz of a wonderfully scaleable engine. Even in low and medium the game looks and plays great, people need to just get over the thought of cranking everything up to the maximum IMO. Kudos to Crytek for making a game that will stand the tests of time despite all the people moaning that they can't max it out just yet... perhaps they should have capped the engine's capabilities a bit lower and just opened it up in future patches, meh, might have stopped some of the unjust hate!