P67 Motherboard Round-up: Asus, Fatal1ty, GB, MSI
3DMark 11 and Gaming Benchmarks
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The latest version of Futuremark's synthetic 3D gaming benchmark, 3DMark11, is specifically bound to Windows 7-based systems because it uses the advanced visual technologies that are only available with DirectX 11, which isn't available on previous versions of Windows. 3DMark11 isn't simply a port of 3DMark Vantage to DirectX 11, though. With this latest version of the benchmark, Futuremark has incorporated four new graphics tests, a physics tests, and a new combined test. We tested the graphics cards here with 3DMark11's Extreme and Performance preset options. |
During 3DMark 11 testing, the Asus P8P67 WS Revolution pulls away from the pack with an overall score of 6513. It is closely followed by the Gigabyte UD5 (6508 3DMarks) and the ASRock Fatal1ty Pro (6268 3DMarks). The GD80 from MSI tallied the lowest score of 6192, granted that's only a 6% separation from the WS Revolution.
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For our next set of tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. When testing processors and motherboards in these games, 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, 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.
During our gaming test, the difference between first and last place was 16 FPS. The Asus P8P67 WS Revolution averaged 192 FPS, while the Asus Pro scored 176 FPS. That comes out to be a 9% disparity, with the rest of the boards falling somewhere in between.
