ASRock Penryn1600SLIX3-Wifi Motherboard Review

3D & Gaming Benchmarks

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 perfromance increases in overclocked situations.

3DMark 06 Benchmark:

Futuremark 3DMark 06 is the worldwide standard in advanced 3D game performance benchmarking. 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.


Results: As 3DMark performance relies heavily of graphics card performance, only a minimal improvement is noted when going from stock speeds on the Q6600 to overclocked speeds which equalled about a 4% boost in performance.

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.


Results: The World in Conflict benchmark shows similar results to 3DMark which means there was only a slight improvement when overclocking the CPU. A 7% gain in performance is noted.


Call of Duty 4 Benchmark:

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is an increasingly popular game among gamers and enthusiasts. Unfortunately the game does not include a benchmarking program; however, FRAPs is often used as a substitute for an in-game benchmark as it records FPS over a user-controlled time frame. To create a replicable circumstance for FRAPS to record an apples-to-apples comparison, 5 minute intervals on the same game level were used.


Results: Overclocked test results for Call of Duty 4 remain consistent with those of 3DMark and World in Conflict and minimal gains are achieved with an overclocked CPU. In this case, an average FPS improvement of 10% is noted which is a bit more than we have seen in the other 3D tests. Nonetheless, this is minimal at best.