MSI 790FX-GD70 AM3 Motherboard Review

Gaming Benchmarks

Company of Heroes

We benchmarked Relic’s Company of Heroes using the built in performance test benchmark. Image quality settings were set to a mixture of medium and high and the resolution was set to 1680x1050.


To see a full display of our Company of Heroes configuration settings, click here.


Although Company of Heroes appears to be fairly GPU limited in these configurations, it is pretty evident that the minimum framerate benefitted the most from improved memory efficiency and clock speed improvements.


Crysis 1.2

We benchmarked Crysis using the “Crysis Benchmark Tool 1.0” and chose a “benchmark_cpu” timedemo to ensure that the GPU was not bottlenecking our results. To further ensure a healthy CPU/platform bottleneck, the tests were conducted in ‘DX9’ mode, with all image quality settings set to “Medium”. The resolution used was 1280x1024.


To see a full display of our Crysis configuration settings, click here.


Crysis is definitely not as GPU limited at 1280x1024 and “Medium” IQ settings. As you can see, additional boosts in clock speed made a very significant framerate improvement and it appears that Crysis prefers four cores over two even if they are clocked a bit slower. Memory subsystem efficiency improvements didn’t seem to do a whole lot for Crysis.


Half-Life 2: Episode 2

It’s pretty hard to believe that it’s been over three years since the release of Half-Life 2. Since then, Valve has made numerous graphical improvements to the source engine and included them in the Episode Two release. Although Episode 2 is much more graphically intensive than the original 2005 release, it is still very CPU limited on modern graphics platforms and makes a great CPU/Memory performance benchmark. To test, we created a custom timedemo with plenty of physics and mayhem in the “Outland” portion of the game. The timedemo was played back three times and an average framerate taken. All visual details were set to maximum quality, and the timedemos run at a resolution of 1920x1200.


To see a full display of our HL2:EP2 configuration settings, click here.


It looks like we were pretty GPU limited in this configuration even though we were pushing framerates in excess of 100FPS. We’d argue that all of these results were within the margin of error.


Futuremark 3DMark06

The Futuremark 3DMark series has been a part of the backbone in computer and hardware reviews since its conception. The trend continues today as 3DMark06 provides consumers with a solid synthetic benchmark geared for performance and comparison in the 3D gaming realm. This remains one of the most sought after statistics, as well as an excellent tool for accurate CPU comparison, and it will undoubtedly be used for years to come.


We see a pretty familiar trend with 3DM06. Being a multi-threaded benchmark, the quad core configuration did best, but small gains were realized with the various memory configurations.