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 Texture Detail, Shadows Quality, Physics Quality, Shaders Quality and Water Quality to High, while all other settings were set 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.






In Crysis with a single 9800 GTX, there's very little performance difference top to bottom – the Gigabyte P45-DQ6 manages to shave a few fractions of a FPS faster than the Asus P5Q Deluxe, but that’s going to be unnoticeable in the real world.

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 1.4.

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 Gigabyte EP45-DQ6 again matches the Asus P5Q Deluxe and both stand tall above the other boards, but just below the DDR3 X48. However, the entire field is just split by a single frame per second, which isn’t really going to cause concern in the real world – that’s good to know though, because at least the Gigabyte board performs the way it should do.

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 a manual run through from the Invasion level, which incorporates all of the effects the game has to offer. We chose not to use the built-in benchmark because it's largely CPU-limited. We used the "very high" preset, and controlled anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering via the advanced settings tab.


The Gigabyte EP45-DQ6 manages to match the DDR3 Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 in the top spot when it comes to average frame rates, but still falls behind a little on the minimum frame rate. That said, it does manage to strike a slight lead over the Asus P5Q Deluxe, but both boards perform very similarly in both average and minimum frame rate. Compared to the previous generation, the performance is a lot better for P45 it seems.