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 High. Because of how intense the game is, we tested with both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering disabled at resolutions above 1,680 x 1,050 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.


It would be fair to say that most people looking to be relatively earlier adopters of Core i7 will be doing some gaming, so it's good to see that this more affordable board didn’t crash and burn when we fired up Crysis. It’s not the fasted board we’ve seen but it was a hair's breadth in from of the Blood Rage and also faster than the Gigabyte GA-EX58-DS4.

Far Cry 2

Publisher: Ubisoft

Far Cry 2 is the latest first person shooter from Ubisoft, and while it continues the Far Cry franchise that Crytek started in 2004, this game is built on its own in-house engine and has no association - other than its name - to anything Crytek has worked on or is working on now. We used a retail version of the game patched to version 1.02, and used the in-built "Action" gameplay demo set to Ultra-Very High settings under DirectX 10.


Interestingly, the X58 Pro produced the slowest minimum frame rate in Far Cry 2 by a fair margin, although the average frame rate was the highest. This points towards inconsistent performance, though not to such a degree that the game isn't playable but the minimum number is significantly lower than the rest of the boards tested, whereas the higher average is not that much greater.