Crysis

Publisher: Electronic Arts

We tested the game using the 64-bit executable under and DirectX 10 with the 1.21 patch applied.

We used a custom timedemo recorded on the Harbor map which is more representative of gameplay than the built-in benchmark that renders things much faster than you're going to experience in game.

For our testing, we set all the settings to medium. Because of how intense the game is, we tested with both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering disabled at resolutions above 1680x1050 for the time being.

There is currently no support for anisotropic filtering in the game, but you can still force it from the driver control panel.




We had considerable trouble getting Crysis to work in the first place - so much so that we had to reinstall the OS and try again. Second time around it worked perfectly but the result was consistently slower than the other boards we've looked at. Even though they all used the same memory timings, CPU, PCI-Express 2.0 interface and GeForce 9800 GTX graphics card, the Foxconn 790FX comes out several FPS slower than the older Asus 790FX.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

Publisher: Activision

Built on an updated version of id Software's Doom 3 engine, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is a team-based first person shooter that recently obtained the title of being the first game to use John Carmack's megatexture technology: a single texture that spans the entire map.

ET:QW also makes use of many vehicles and large open areas which means the action in view can get really intensive in this team based shooter. It's also the only game in this suite that utilises OpenGL instead of the pretty much industry-standard DirectX API. We used the full retail version of the game patched to version 1.5.

We recorded a timenetdemo on the Valley level which lasts for several minutes during an online game – this used lots of the different graphical effects to create what we've deemed to be a fairly typical slice of action to stress the system. We also created a custom autoexec file that enabled ultra high video settings, over and above that of the standard in game "high", while soft particles was left disabled for the time being.


The Foxconn A79A-S is the best of the test, performing fractionally faster than the Gigabyte 790GX and Asus nForce 780a SLI motherboards, and nosing out a couple of FPS more than the Asus 790FX even.

World in Conflict

Publisher: Sierra

For our testing purposes, we used a full retail copy of the game and patched it to version 1.007, which includes a few fixes and some improved performance under DirectX 10. We used the "very high" present, and controlled anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering via the advanced settings tab.


World in Conflict performance is unfortunately the other way entirely, and no amount of testing and retesting affected it. Across the board though, there was very little difference in average framerates - less than one frame per second between all AMD chipset boards, and the Foxconn 790FX board only has a slightly slower minimum frame rate than the Asus 790FX. The Nvidia solution is considerably faster than the AMD chipsets though, even despite using the same graphics card, memory and CPU.