Gigabyte GA-EP45T-Extreme Motherboard Review

Gaming Benchmarks

We have forced ourselves to step up to 3DMark Vantage results for all reviews because the public demands it. We have had our troubles in the past with this benchmark and the HD3870X2 but recent driver and Vista updates have alleviated all issues and it is smooth sailing now. 3DMark Vantage is the newest in a long line of 3D benchmarking software from Futuremark and is the most elaborate to date. Featuring multiple presets for various system configurations, Vantage is the culmination of all 3DMarks past relying on system and GPU power for its results. We will stick to the Performance preset as it seems to be the most popular at this point in time.

3Dmark Vantage starts off the 3D and gaming benchmarks with slight increase in score going from bone stock to the XMP profile of the Corsair Dominator memory we are using here today. Normally the 3D and gaming benchmarks are the least influenced by system speed increases and a lot of the time don't show any improvement. Vantage has shown a small amount of gains, but Crysis and UT3 might be different.

We all know what Crysis is and how much it beats up systems but we wanted to add it to the gaming benchmarks to see how system changes can improve performance on a mid-level system. Detail levels are all set to Medium with the resolution at 1680x1050. We ran the benchmarks with a demo of the Sphere level in DX9 and 64-bit. The game looks great with this setup and plays just well enough to keep us happy.

Well, the gains aren't massive but they are certainly there. With over a 5% increase in average FPS and a 10% increase in the minimum FPS, Crysis definitely became a lot closer to playable at these settings with the system speed increase. We would imagine most of this can be chalked up to CPU frequency gains but some will come down to memory and the memory sub-system.

The 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.

In a small twist of sorts, UT3 shows barely any increase in average or minimum FPS when comparing to the two setups. Usually UT3 is the only game showing performance gains with system performance increase but Crysis definitely showed to have more benefit from the XMP profile.