Of course, we had to test out Crysis, which yielded some of the most surprising results. Benchmark results for the original Crysis, at its highest settings and full 16xQ antialiasing delivered a modest average of 26 FPS, dipping down as low as 15 FPS at some points. Gameplay produced 35 FPS for most areas, with brief and occasional drops to 20 FPS during heavy activity. However, the surprise came when we loaded up Crysis Warhead, which dropped to 25 FPS (sometimes dipping to 11 FPS) during gameplay when put to the "Enthusiast" setting. Running the 64-bit version of Warhead had no impact on graphics performance, but toning things down one step to the "Gamer" setting brought us back up to an acceptable 35 FPS. Alternatively, keeping the Enthusiast setting but turning down antialiasing brought significant performance boosts, with about 45 FPS with no antialiasing and between 35-40 with it set at 4x.

The physics in Crysis hardly made an impact on the Core i7 processor. Original Crysis CPU benchmarks showed 12-18% CPU usage in light physics tests, 18-20% in heavier areas. CPU usage with Warhead barely showed up when playing in 64-bit mode, and total processor usage never went past 10%.

To really put the hardware to the test, we turned to Empire: Total War. This history based strategy game not only has massive armies fighting on large battlefields, but it shows it all in ridiculous detail. Every musket and cannon ball is tracked individually, so the calculations must be astronomical. Plus, it's a game that specifically sports the Core i7 certification logo.

Even in this case, we saw more emphasis on the video card than the processor. In 2v2 skirmishes, we saw processor usage rise up to 15%. However, the video card got the workout of its life. At "Very High" settings and options like Hardware Shadows and Depth of Field effects checked off, the game crawled at 15 FPS in 2v2 land battles. Unchecking shadows and depth of field boosted performance to 25-32 FPS on land, but the benefits didn't carry over to sea battles, which started 13 FPS and turned into a 4 FPS slideshow when the naval armada's met each other. It looks like Empire was the game that pushed the GeForce GTX 295 well past its limits.

So, is the Paladin F870-SB, with its cutting edge hardware, worth it? The Core i7 CPU provides more (way more) than enough processing power to satisfy the demands of practically any game. Although we managed push the video card really hard, it produced significantly better results than GeForce 9800 GTX+ and Windows XP setup we use normally. Crysis wouldn't even let us put the game into Very High mode with those settings, and the game barely managed to load with antialiasing turned up. By comparison, the X3 Rolling demo at the same settings gave an average of 53 FPS, and dropped down to 8 FPS at the benchmark's most stressful point. Oddly, Unreal Tournament 3 also game us 62 FPS, which suggests there might be something specific to that game influencing the results.

The bottom line is that the Paladin F870-SB is a solidly built system that uses the latest in technology. It lets players, at least those who can afford super high-end systems, experience games at their best, and we couldn't find much fault with it.