Moving onto actual games - our results here represent the average frame rate produced by the system.

Far Cry 2 up first – using this game for testing is quite straight forward due to the inbuilt benchmarking program.
As well as using the GTX260 I also tested the HD 6310 GPU at various quality settings @ 1280x1024 to see if I could manage a realistically playable setting.

At 1280x1024 the HD 6310 really struggles at the highest and even medium settings. Smooth(ish) playback starts to appear at the lowest settings but with 2x AA still enabled. Turning off AA results in a framerate that would allow someone to play the game - it is possible, but not pretty! Overclocking does provide a slight increase in performance but in all honesty it's barely noticeable.



The GTX260 at the highest quality settings almost matches the performance of the HD 6310 running the lowest game settings. The framerate is almost identical regardless of resolution which I think could be related to a bottleneck caused by that 4x PCIe slot. Overclocking did actually provide a little extra performance which pushed the average framerate up by around 2 FPS across the board. Although that doesn't sound like much that does represent an increase of slightly more than 10%.