Z97 Motherboard Round Up: EVGA, MSI, Gigabyte

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.

The Z97 based motherboard we tested all performed very well in our low-res game tests, though there was little to differentiate the boards in terms of performance. Only a few frames per second separate the top six fastest systems here.