Gaming Benchmarks

We had to bypass 3DMark Vantage for this review because it didn't want to play nicely with the HD3870X2 we used for this review. Honestly, I am not a fan of Vantage at this point as it has just caused headaches for me up until now. Needless to say, 3DMark 06 is still a very viable tool for testing a systems performance.

Still no love for Vantage here but 3DMark 06 will always get a play, and boy does it like the processor performance of this setup giving a 20% in score. Obviously the extra CPU power eliminates the GPU bottleneck and really lets the HD38070X2 stretch its wings in 06. Normally the CPU score only equates to a small percentage of the overall score but higher CPU frequency also means higher 3D benchmark results and that is obvious in these results.

Having very little to do with the actual game play, the Company of Heroes in-game benchmark is a very consistent way to test 3D performance of a system. All detail levels are maxed out and the resolution was set to the very popular 1680x1050. These settings are quite common but a hefty video card will be needed in order to not be the bottleneck at these settings.

In the past motherboard reviews we used the CoH in-game benchmark and found very little difference in the results between stock and the overclocked settings. The same holds true again today as it clearly appears that CoH is limited by the GPU...at least in the in-game benchmark. Actual game play is a different story but we won't get into that here. Let's now move on to a new game in the motherboard reviews here at HWC, UT3.

Like Company of Heroes, detail levels are all maxed and the resolution set to 1680x1050 or what would be considered the playable settings for this configuration. We use a benchmarking utility to derive results from UT3 using a simulated 12 bot match on the Shangri-La level for 3 minutes. This is run 10 times with the results averaged out. There is some variance in the results of UT3, that is why the additional runs.

Unreal Tournament games in the past have always shown performance gains with system speed and were not just limited to the GPU like most of what we see today. UT3 is no different and this should result in a bit of variance between our setups.

With the bump in CPU frequency, we actually gained a nice little boost in performance in UT3. On all three levels, minimum FPS, maximum FPS and average FPS, the gains were evident and easily noticeable. We are only looking at an 11% increase in average frame rates but that is really giving you overhead with a higher GPU. The UT3 benchmarking utility we utilize does have quite a bit of variance from run to run, but we did 10 runs of this benchmark and average them out for the results to ensure a fairly accurate portrayal of the type of results in-game we may find.