Gaming and 3D performance
Before any of the results, I've personally got to stick my hand up and admit that a 9500GT is not really a suitable graphics card for differentiating these boards in terms of testing. This is something I will look to address for my next review.
We uncovered a bug with the two Intel boards when testing with our i5 670 Clarkdale CPU. At stock or overclocked, the 16x PCI-E 2.0 graphics card slot dropped to 1x link width. This only happened with the Clarkdale, our i7 870 CPU ran with the full 16x speed. This occurred on the latest 4816 BIOS on the Intel website as well as the 4752 BIOS that the rest of the testing was carried out on. Intel states that the i5 670 should be supported from the 3878 BIOS onwards.
Crysis : Warhead
Using Crytek’s CryEngine 2, Crysis : Warhead still provides one of the most intensive graphical benchmarks available.
Very little to separate the boards in this benchmark, the minimum FPS slightly preferring the two ATX boards.
Far Cry 2
Featuring fantastic visuals courtesy of the Dunia Engine, this game also features one of the most impressive benchmark tools we have seen in a PC game.
Intel's boards come in a fair way behind the P55 Classified 200 with the Clarkdale CPU, the 1x PCI-E bandwidth proving a significant bottleneck.
Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II
We are big fans of the Warhammer franchise, especially Dawn of War II. One of the latest RTS games in our library is also one of the more demanding titles on both the CPU and GPU.
Again, the 1x PCI-E bottleneck doesn't help the Intel boards in Dawn of War II either.
AutoCAD 2010 x64—Cadalyst 2008
We utilize AutoCAD 2010 x64 and the Cadalyst Labs 5 benchmark.
The Cadalyst benchmark seems to be a great all round test of 3D performance mingled with fast hard drive access. We're at a loss to explain why the P55 Classified 200 came out so much worse on this test, but this was repeatable.
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