If you want to play at the highest quality setting at high resolutions, generally your best choice is to upgrade the video card. If you look back at the charts you notice that overall we see that regardless of the CPU speed and the memory frequency we run at, the average framerate stays the same at 1920x1200. The exception is when we use the Corsair DDR3 memory with a FSB of 1800MHz and a frequency of 1080MHz and 1800MHz. Now suddenly we get a impressive boost in performance. This indicates that using DDR3 and a high FSB also has a large effect on the performance.

The question whether it is better to use dual core or quad core is a tricky question to answer. At the same frequency the quad core definitely beats the dual core CPU. However, if we look at a dual core at the same price as the Q6600 used in the article, we see that the performance is helped up by the higher frequency edging it ahead of the quad-core Q6600. I do not know if the game can use one of the cores for AI etc., something that would not show in the benchmark. The benchmark however does support debris physics (debris in the benchmark does not fly the same way every time) and this is turned on at the High and Very High quality settings. The quad-core CPU however still does not seem to help at these quality settings so the game seems not to take advantage of the extra two cores, at least not enough to offset the lower frequency of the CPU. As we move up in the resolutions and quality settings the importance of the CPU diminishes as the GPU becomes the limited factor.