The AMD Phenom II X4 970 performed reasonably well, but despite its higher clock frequency, it was 13% slower than the Core i5 750. Surprisingly, the Core i3 540 (dual-core with Hyper-Threading) was 9% slower than the Phenom II X4 970. Even more shocking, the Core i3 540 was faster than AMD’s mighty Phenom II X6 1075T (hexa-core). The Phenom II X4 970 is clocked roughly 17% higher than the Phenom II X6 1075T and it was 14% faster even though the Phenom II X6 1075T has two more cores. Civilization V doesn’t use six cores, but that’s to be expected. It appears the game can use up to four cores, but not aggressively so. The Core i3’s Hyper-Threading is enough to give it a real advantage over standard dual-core processors and the efficiency of its architecture makes it more powerful than the Phenom II X6 in this game. The Pentium G6950 was 17% slower than the Core i3 540, but that’s to be expected with less cache and no HT. The Core 2 Duo E8500 was on par with the G6950. We found it interesting that the dual-core Athlon II X2 260 was 2fps faster than the quad-core Athlon II X4 645, thanks to its slight clock speed advantage. Finally, the old 2.40GHz Core 2 Quad Q6600 was the slowest processor tested, delivering just 20fps.
