P55 Motherboard Round-up: Asus, EVGA, GB, Intel, MSI

Name: P55 Motherboard Round-up: Asus, EVGA, GB, Intel, MSI - Page 15
Brand: P55

by Mathew Miranda — Friday, April 02, 2010, 10:30 AM EDT

Low-Resolution Gaming: Batman and FarCry 2

Taking the GPU out of the Equation

For our next set of tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with Batman and FarCry2. When testing processors and motherboards in these games, we drop the resolution to 800x600 and reduce all of thein-game graphical options to their minimum values to isolate CPU and memory performance as much as possible. However, any 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.

Although the difference between first and last only consists of a few frames per second, we can still measure it through our testing and report the results. A quick glance reveals that only 8 fps separates all the scores of our Batman testing, while the difference is a mere 6 fps in FarCry 2. For the most part, results among the different boards were scattered in both tests. The only commonality worth mentioning here is the slightly superior performance of Gigabyte's P55A-UD6 motherboard, which recorded the highest fps in both games.