When you consider all six games, the winner becomes abundantly clear. There's not a single game where the Core 2 Duo didn't deliver a higher average frame rate. Across all games, Intel's new CPU delivered a 16% higher frame rate. What is more important is that it spent a significantly smaller amount of time beneath our arbitrary thresholds for a really smooth and enjoyable gameplay experience. In fact, there are three games-half of our sample group!-where the Core 2 Duo essentially never dipped below the minimum threshold at all.

Both systems are truly fantastic game platforms, and the recent aggressive pricing by both Intel and AMD are very exciting. Compared with last year's tests, the games in our group are more demanding, and our minimum frame-rate thresholds are higher, too. Despite this, both systems delivered higher overall frame rates and, more importantly, spent less time beneath the minimum FPS threshold.

Though we proclaim Core 2 Duo the clear winner, we can't be too hard on the Athlon 64 X2. It turned in a great performance and definitely makes a great gaming CPU. We've lauded the game performance of AMD's CPUs for a long time, and they didn't get any slower with the introduction of Intel's Core 2 lineup, just less expensive.

The real winner here is the consumer. You don't need to spend several thousand dollars on hardware to make a great gaming system. At 1280x1024-the most common LCD resolution and 40% higher-res than 720p high definition-you can have a really awesome time gaming with a single sub-$300 graphics card and a CPU just over $300. And you don't need to reduce the game's detail levels to do it; we ran all these tests using each game's "high" setting. With such high-performance dual-core CPUs priced so aggressively, and with Vista coming out in the next year with a strong focus on improving PC gaming, the signs look good for PC game fans.