Intel Z68 Express with Smart Response Technology
Gaming: Crysis and ETQW
For our next set of tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with Crysis and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. When testing processors with Crysis or ET:QW, 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.
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The Z68 Express based motherboards we tested offered slightly better performance in the low-res gaming tests over the P67, especially in the Crysis benchmark. Due to the similarities in the chipsets, however, we suspect these small differences can be attributed to more mature drives and BIOS optimization on the newer Z68 boards, which had more time to bake than the initial batch of P67s did. If we had a newer B3-revision P67 Express based motherboard on hand, flashed to its latest BIOS, and used the same chipset and storage drivers that were used on the Z68 platforms, the deltas here would likely be non-existent.
