[RE77ACTION]

As promised I've tested the Black Death track several times with scaled down CPU performance. For this test I've lowered the multiplier of my CPU from 15 to 13 and kept everything else the same (FSB still 227+1 (because of smiley error when I type eight in numbers). This way we know we are only testing the CPU and not things like memory, NB, SB, etc. The CPU runs now with 4 cores on 2,96 GHz instead my originally overclocked 3,42 GHz.

The results are pretty staggering if you ask me. The average frame rate dropped from 32 to 29 which is a decrease of about 9.5% while I decreased the CPU speed with about 13,5%. The strange thing here is that the CPU utilization is about the same as it was with higher CPU speeds. And still none of the cores reached ever 100% for a moment.

Maybe I and many others get never 100% utilization shown because the game uses functions which saturates only a part of the processor. And saturating only that part never translates to full utilization in a graph. I'm no expert on this, but I vaguely remind that I once read something like this.

It looks to me that my processor is a bottleneck even when it never shows a full 100% utilization in any one of its cores. In these tests I've grown stronger towards a better CPU. However more CPU power will give diminishing returns as this little test already showed.

I hope someone else will find these results useful.