Z68 Motherboard Roundup: ASUS, EVGA, ASRock, GB, MSI, ZOTAC

Low-Res Gaming: Crysis and ET:QW

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 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 do place some load on the CPU rather than GPU.

Low-Resolution Gaming: Crysis and ET:Quake Wars
Taking the GPU out of the Equation (Well, trying to at least)






The scores for these games are a little odd; in ET:QW, ASUS once again owned the top spot (with the Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3 in second) and was the only motherboard to top 200, but in the Crysis test, it tested toward the middle of the pack. The MSI board did comparatively poorly in ET:QW but turned in one of the better scores in the Crysis test.

The rest of the scores showed a reasonably tight grouping, although in Crysis, the ASRock and ZOTAC boards failed to impress while the EVGA Z68 FTW was a good step faster than the rest of the field.

Tags:  Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, Zotac, evga, Z68, ARock

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