What do different video cards and CPUs mean to gamers in World of Warcraft, F.E.A.R., Battlefield 2, and Call of Duty 2? HardOCP played all the games with 6 different CPUs and 4 different video cards to find out the difference in real-world gameplay. Here's an excerpt:

On the Intel platform you need at least a 3.2 GHz to overcome CPU bottlenecking in games. If you have anything slower than 3.2GHz, your CPU may be holding back the performance of your video card. We saw absolutely no benefit to the faster Front Side Bus of the Pentium 4 3.4 EE in games. For all intents and purposes you will get the same gameplay experience out of a 3.4 EE as you will a 3.2 D.

The AMD Athlon 64 processors provide a slightly better gaming experience than the Intel Pentium 4 and Pentium series processors. We found that sometimes even the AMD Athlon 64 3800+ will bottleneck your video card. In most of our gameplay testing though, the AMD Athlon 64 3800+ did not bottleneck our video cards at all allowing our GPUs to reach their full potential. There were literally no real gameplay advantages between an Athlon FX-60 and Athlon X2 4800+ in our testing.