DFI LanParty UT X58-T3eH8 LGA 1366 Motherboard Review

Gaming Benchmarks

We have forced ourselves to step up to 3DMark Vantage results for all reviews because the public demands it. 3DMark Vantage is the newest in a long line of 3D benchmarking software from Futuremark and is the most elaborate to date. Featuring multiple presets for various system configurations, Vantage is the culmination of all 3DMarks past relying on system and GPU power for its results. We will stick to the Performance preset as it seems to be the most popular at this point in time.

We get a bit of a mixed bag of results from these two iterations of 3DMark. In 06 there is a definite drop in score going from triple channel to dual channel, but in Vantage on the Performance preset, there is no difference at all. We weren't expecting any loss in performance in either benchmark when removing a stick of memory so the 06 results caught us off guard, but in all three benchmark runs we did, the 600 point difference between the two setups was present.

We all know what Crysis is and how much it beats up systems but we wanted to add it to the gaming benchmarks to see how system changes can improve performance on a mid-level system. Detail levels are all set to Very High with the resolution at 1680x1050 with 4xAA. We ran the benchmarks with a demo of the Sphere level in DX9 and 64-bit. The game looks great with this setup and plays just well enough to keep us happy.

Moving on to Crysis we see that the differences we just saw in 3DMark 06 do not translate in any way to in game benching of Crysis. In fact, things couldn't be much more even across the board again portraying just how little memory affects this game. The bottlenecks in Crysis happen much further up the line than memory with settings this high.

Another new fall release of this past silly season Far Cry 2 has some beautiful scenery but does lack that buttery smooth game play in places. A lot of moaning and groaning has occurred with Far Cry 2 but acceptable frame rates are much easier to achieve than Crysis and the game play is plenty smooth enough to enjoy. We were really able to crank up the settings with this benchmark on this setup.

The Far Cry 2 time demo shows about the same results as Crysis. There appears to be a slight drop in maximum frame rates achieved from the stock results to the other two sets of overclocked numbers, but the minimum and average frame rates are level down the line. Perhaps this isn't what anyone wants to hear, but with detail settings turned up high at 1680x1050 and a GTX 295 at stock clocks, the system plays a very small role in most games and certainly the ones we have tested here. With Core i7, the setup is just so powerful that even a hefty overclock really adds little to no performance. Even dropping a single stick of memory leaving us with 2x2GB shows little to no performance decrease. We aren't making this up, the results are hard to misconstrue. Obviously different setups will show different gains and losses, but this setup shows really no setback to dropping a stick of memory. Perhaps in actual gaming there is, but if the benchmarks are any indicator, there won't be a lick of difference in frame rates.

The newest game in our testing sweet, Left 4 Dead was just added after we were asked to include a Source powered game in our memory benchmarks. Being based on the Source engine, there is definitely a chance that system performance will heavily influence the results. We used FRAPs to measure frame per second on a custom time demo of the rooftop level.

The last of our game testing comes from a Source engine game, Left 4 Dead. The latest in a history of efficient games that play well on most any system, L4D is a high energy shooter and frame rate drops aren't something you can deal with in this game. As we can see from the results, no matter how we set this system up, frame rates with these components are not a problem. Like the other games we get pretty steady performance from the three configurations, but there is a little more variance than we have seen up until now. Again, the Source engine does rely on the system a bit more than most games so that would be the explanation for that, but the differences are definitely not significant in any way. Further evidence that with a setup like this, overclocking aide for benchmarking is all but pointless.