DFI Lanparty Blood Iron P45-T2RS Elite Motherboard Review

This section will provide an overview of stock vs. overclocked 3D results in synthetic benchmark and gaming situations. A stock Nvidia 9800GTX is used for all tests and comparisons will be made to show performance increases in overclocked situations. CrossFire results are not available since the board is not CrossFire compatible.


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. Since we did not change the clocks of the GPU, we only see very minor in improvement 3DMark Vantage, an increase of 1%.


3DMark 2006 Benchmark

Futuremark 3DMark 06 has been the worldwide standard in advanced 3D game performance benchmarking since its release. 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. To be consistent with most users of 3DMark 06, the tests below use 3DMark 06 default settings and a resolution of 1280x1024.


Results: Since it is starting to get dated, 3DMark 2006 has a bit more reliance on CPU power than Vantage. This means we see more of an improvement with a CPU overclock. A gain in 3DMarks of 12% is noted in 3DMark 2006. Not huge, but still worth the effort to overclock the CPU.


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 “Very High” which gives fullscreen anti-alias at 4x and anisotropic filtering at 4x.


Results: The World in Conflict benchmark shows a modest gain in average frames per second, an improvement of 11% or an extra 3 FPS. This says that those extra CPU Mhz do contribute, but to a lesser extent than GPU overclocking.


Crysis Benchmark

Since Crysis is one of the newer games that is still 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. Having a stand-alone benchmarking system for a game gives much more accurate and replicable results than using programs like FRAPS.

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=4x, Vsync=Enabled, DX10, 64 bit test, FullScreen, and Global Game Quality was High.


Results: The Crysis benchmark shows a slightly better gain in average FPS on an overclocked system than World in Conflict. An improvement of 15% or an extra 6 FPS is noted.