Asus P5Q Deluxe - P45 Chipset with DDR2

For our next set of tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with Crysis and F.E.A.R. When testing motherboards or processors with Crysis or F.E.A.R., we drop the resolution to 800x600, and reduce all of the in-game graphical options to their minimum values to isolate CPU and memory performance as much as possible.  However, the in-game effects, which control the level of detail for the games' physics engines and particle systems, are left at their maximum values, since these actually do place some load on the CPU rather than GPU.

Remember those lower peak memory bandwidth and higher latency scores in the SiSoft SANDRA benchmarks? Well, here's where they've appeared to have an affect.  In both the Crysis and F.E.A.R. low-resolution tests, the P45 based Asus P5Q Deluxe finished behind its X48-based counterparts, to the tune of 6% to 10%.  We suspect there is still some BIOS tuning work to do, to get the P45's performance up here a bit.