Gigabyte Z87 Haswell Motherboard Round-Up

For our next set of tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with Crysis (DirectX) and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (OpenGL). When testing processors with Crysis or ET:QW, we drop the resolution to 1024x768, 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 place some load on the CPU rather than GPU.

Low-Resolution Gaming: Crysis and ET: Quake Wars Taking the GPU out of the Equation

The ASUS motherboards and the Gigabyte Z87X-UD4H posted scores within a few FPS of one another, but the G1.Sniper 5 and Z87X-OC Force took a small nap on these. In Crysis, the difference is more pronounced, as the G1.Sniper 5 came in about 5 FPS below the lead group, while the Z87X-OC Force was another few FPS below that. The gap isn't as pronounced in ET:QW, but the lower scores on two of Gigabyte's more high-end boards just shows they're tuned with tight specifications with clock timing chips set less aggressively. 

If you wanted to gain this small bit of performance back, you could just overclock by a few MHz here or there.