Gigabyte EP45-DS3R P45 Motherboard Review

This section will provide an overview of stock vs. overclocked 3D results in synthetic benchmark and gaming situations. CrossFireX is enabled for all tests and comparisons will be made to show performance increases in overclocked situations.

3DMark Vantage Benchmark:

3DMark Vantage is the latest release by Futuremark, creators of the 3DMark suite. This program is the first Futuremark version of 3DMark designed exclusively for Windows Vista. 3DMark Vantage consists of 2 CPU and 2 GPU tests as well as and 6 feature tests all of which are very hardware intensive. Four presets are available to allow for those with older PCs to benchmark just as easily as those with cutting edge hardware. For our testing, we will use the Performance setting with all other settings at default. The build version is the latest patched version of Vantage v1.0.1.


Results: Similar to 3DMark 2006 upon it’s release, Vantage performance relies heavily of graphics card performance, with modest gains going from 3000Mhz on an E3110 to 4203Mhz, an improvement of about 6%.


3DMark 2006 Benchmark:

Futuremark 3DMark 06 has been the worldwide standard in advanced 3D game performance benchmarking for a few years now. A fundamental tool for PC users and gamers, 3DMark06 uses advanced real-time 3D game workloads to measure PC performance using a suite of DirectX 9 3D graphics tests, CPU tests, and 3D feature tests. 3DMark06 tests include all new HDR/SM3.0 graphics tests, SM2.0 graphics tests, AI and physics driven single and multiple cores or processor CPU tests and a collection of comprehensive feature tests to reliably measure next generation gaming performance today. The tests below use 3DMark 2006 default setting and a resolution of 1280x1024.


Results: 3DMark 2006 has a bit more reliance on CPU power so we see more of an improvement with a CPU overclock than we do with Vantage. A gain in 3DMarks of 16% is noted in 3DMark 2006, not bad for only an increase in CPU speed.


World in Conflict Benchmark:

The World in Conflict in-game benchmark is a great test to show video card performance in real gaming situations. Under the Graphics menu in options, you can choose a variety of video settings and there is a "Run Benchmark" button. The actual benchmark uses all of the game’s graphic capabilities and is a good indication which settings will be optimal for a user’s system. For the tests below resolution was set to 1680x1050 and graphics was set to “High” which gives fullscreen anti-alias at 2x and anisotropic filtering at 2x.


Results: The World in Conflict benchmark shows a respectable gain in frames per second, an improvement of 27% or an extra 10 FPS. This tells us that not only overclocking a video card will improve your gaming experience; those extra CPU Mhz also contribute to FPS.


Crysis Benchmark:

Since Crysis is one of the latest games that is also among the most popular, we thought we would take a look performance increases in an overclocked system. Luckily Guru3d.com provides a robust front-end to benchmark Crysis downloadable from their website. It provides the ability to queue up many runs and will provide detailed results for each test as well as an overall summary with accurate averages.

For this test we looped (3 times) and recorded a standard timedemo on the Demo Map Island level which goes through jungle, over water and in vehicles. Resolution used was 1680x1050 and other settings included: AA=2x, Vsync=Disabled, DX9, 64 bit test, FullScreen, and Global Game Quality was Medium.


Results: The Crysis benchmark shows a similar FPS gain on an overclocked system to World in Conflict. An improvement of 20% or an extra 12 FPS is noted.