MSI P45 Platinum and Diamond Motherboards
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For our next set of tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with the Crysis Single Player demo 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.
In our gaming benchmarks, we found that the two MSI P45-based boards lagged behind somewhat when testing Crysis, yet led the pack in ET: Quake Wars. We also noted that between boards of the same type (X48, P45), those using DDR2 memory typically fared a frame per second or better when compared to another board using DDR3. With both sets of RAM running at 1067 MHz, the extra latency of the DDR3 sticks just manages to hold these boards back that little bit. Couple that with prices of DDR2 hitting all time lows and it's still tempting to stick with boards that use that particular type of memory.
