Asus A8V Deluxe "Wireless Edition" (Socket 939)
3DMark03 & Comanche 4
It's not an actual game, but 3DMark03's built-in CPU test is a "gaming related" DirectX metric that's useful for comparing relative performance among similarly equipped systems. This test consists of two different 3D scenes that are generated with a software renderer, which is dependant on the host CPU's performance. This means that the calculations normally reserved for your 3D accelerator, are instead sent to the central processor. The number of frames generated per second in each test are used to determine the final score.
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We had another virtual dead-heat in 3DMark03's CPU performance test. This time around, the MSI MS-6702E finished with the best score of the bunch, but with only 11 points (1.2%) separating the MSI and Asus boards, it can hardly be called a "victory" for MSI. The nForce3, once again, brought up the rear.
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We continued our testing with another DirectX game, Novalogic's combat helicopter simulation, Comanche 4. Despite the fact that this is a game benchmark that can be used to test the relative performance of video cards, frame rates are strongly influenced by processor speed and available memory bandwidth, especially at low resolutions with sound disabled, which is how we ran the tests to get the frame rates listed below.
Although the performance delta isn't drastic, the MSI MS-6702E did outperform the A8V Deluxe by a notable margin in the Comanche 4 benchmark. At 78.83 Frames Per Second (FPS), the MSI board was a full 5.2% faster than the Asus board, when powered by the same processor. Keep in mind that the Asus A8V Deluxe we're testing here is a very early sample. With some time to tweak the BIOS, Asus will probably be able to increase performance a bit in the future.
