Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P - P45 at its Finest
by Gary Key on February 3, 2009 12:15 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Test Setup
We selected the ASUS EAH4870 DK/HTDI/1GD5 video card for GPU duties. It is a non-reference design that offers improved thermals and acoustics over the standard HD4870 1GB cards on our board choices. We think if a user is going to run CrossFireX on one of these platforms, then the best possible performance choice is the HD4870 1GB. Depending on pricing of the HD 4870 1GB cards, a 4870X2 might be a better choice for most users.
The WD Caviar Black 1TB is our hard drive of choice for storage purposes. LG’s GGC-H20L Blu-ray playback capable drive fills in for optical duties. We purchased two of G.Skill's impressive DDR2-1100 4GB kits that operate at DDR2-1100 on our boards with about 2.04V. We used 4GB in our standard benchmarks with memory set at DDR2-1066 with 5-5-5-15 timings at 1.8V. Vigor Gaming provided their Monsoon III LT CPU cooler that offers mounting kits for sockets 1366, 775, and AM2+ processors. ABS provided their Canyon 695 case and it has proved to be exemplary during testing.
We are providing Phenom II X4 940 and Intel Core i7 920 results as a reference point only. For further information on the setups we utilized please visit our article detailing these two platforms.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
73 Comments
View All Comments
poohbear - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
thanks for benching @ 1680x1050 so we know real world usage. hate it when they bench @ a real low rez even if there's a difference as that means nothing to 99% of ppl that game @ anything but the lower resolutions.:)crimson117 - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
When they bench at low resolutions, it's to discover any CPU bottleneck. It's the equivalent of saying, "we know the GPU can handle this low res at super high framerates, so will the CPU processing the game mechanics keep the framerates down?".For example, an RTS like Supreme Commander will have okay graphics, but most of the horsepower will be the CPU calculating troop movement, damage, etc, especially on large maps with lots of players. So they'll want to take the GPU's rendering speed out of the equation and see how fast the CPU can do its gameplay calculations.
This can really help people know which part of their computer to upgrade. A friend of mine has an E6300 Conroe 1.86GHz (one of the earliest C2D's), so his CPU is pretty old. He has a 9800GT graphics card. If he wants to play Supreme Commander with 10 opponents at once, should he upgrade his graphics or his CPU?
At low resolutions, the video card can handle it no problem, but no matter what resolution, the CPU still has to calculate 10 players actions at once. If they only benchmarked at high resolution, then the graphics lag would mask the fact that the CPU calculations were also laggy. So by reducing the resolution to really low levels, he'd find out the CPU still can't keep up and should be upgraded.
zebrax2 - Tuesday, February 3, 2009 - link
seems like those polls are starting to take effect