EVGA P55 FTW LGA1156 Motherboard Review

This section will provide an overview of stock vs. overclocked 3D results in synthetic benchmark and gaming situations. SLI is enabled for all tests and comparisons will be made to show performance increases in overclocked situations. The GPUs used for the test are a set of GTS250s.

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 2800Mhz on an i7 860 to 4000Mhz, an improvement of about 4%.


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 defult setting and a resolution of 1280x1024.


Results: 3DMark 2006 has much more reliance on CPU power due to the age of the benchmark; and we always see more of an improvement with a CPU overclock than we do with Vantage. A gain in 3DMarks of 38% is noted in 3DMark 2006, quite impressive 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 “Very High” which gives fullscreen anti-alias at 4x and anisotropic filtering at 4x.


Results: The World in Conflict benchmark shows a respectable gain in frames per second, an improvement of 18% or an extra 9 FPS. This tells us that not only overclocking a video card will improve your gaming experience; those extra CPU Mhz also contribute to FPS.


Call of Juarez Benchmark:

Developed by Techland, the Call of Juarez Benchmark is a fast-paced Wild-West shooter. CoJ is a very attractive DX10 benchmark to watch and we feel it is great to test a system in gaming situations. Call of Juarez uses Shader Model 4 with DirectX 10, so the usage of Vista32 (at the minimum) is necessary. There is lots of movement into different environments and some cool looking water systems where the physics is done via geometry shader. For our tests, 1680x1050 resolution, 4x AA, and High Detail is used.


Results: The Call of Juarez DX10 Benchmark is very graphics dependant and shows little gain with a CPU overclock. We see a modest gain in average frames per second of 6% or an extra 2 FPS. Stay tuned for the difference between one and two GPUs in the SLI section, I think you may be pleasantly surprised with the results for CoJ.