Intel P35 Bearlake Motherboard And DDR3 Memory – Asus and Corsair
Quake 4 And Half Life 2 : EP1 Gaming Performance
For our next set of tests, we benchmarked all of the test systems using custom single-player Quake 4 and HL2: EP1 timedemos. Here, with Quake we installed the game's official v1.3 point release which is SMP capable. And we turned the resolution down to 800X600 to take the load off our GeForce 8800 GTX cards. Although Quake 4 typically taxes today's high-end GPUs, when it's configured at these minimal settings, it is much more CPU and memory bandwidth-bound than anything else. For the EP1 testing, we performed a siimlar procedure, with the game set to 800X600 with HDR disabled.
|
|
Comparing notes, there's roughly a 3% advantage for our Bearlake-based systems, versus the P965 chipset-based system. The other take-away is that at 1333 FSB and 3GHz CPU speed, memory bandwidth or latency didn't matter much, it's all about CPU clock speed with Quake.
Half Life 2, on the other hand, does show a tendency toward memory bandwidth, as you can see ever so slightly in the 3GHz DDR3-1333 enabled score. Other than that, no significant marginalities are observed.
