As the gaming community keeps their eyes open for Starcraft II related news, PC Games Hardware has taken 13 CPUs and put them through their paces in Starcraft II beta benchmark.

Note that for reasons of convenience, the benchmark was ran in Starcraft II’s replay feature, which takes AI calculations out of the test.

Starcraft II uses only two cores, but quad core Q6600 ends up slightly faster than dual core E6600. The game apparently likes additional cache, which works well for Intel’s E8400 and two Lynnfield CPUs. Phenom CPUs also did pretty well, although they’re behind i5 and i7 offerings. 

Based on these results in this particular scene, Core i5 and i7 CPUs would be ideal CPUs for the game, but Phenom X2 545 at 3.0 GHz is obviously a much wiser investment as it performes a bit slower but comes at a significantly lower price point.

You can find benchmark results and check out the video here.