Foxconn P67A-S Motherboard Review

UT3 is the fourth game in the Unreal Tournament series.  It has no story mode gameplay and is exclusively designed for multiplayer action.  While the gameplay and weapons are similar to the UT2004 counterpart, the gaming engine is all new.  For this benchmark, we're using the UT3Bench tool from Guru3D, and CarbonFire Botmatch to record framerates.  The resolution was set to 800x600 to minimize any performance gains from the video card.

Crysis is based in a fictional future where an ancient alien spacecraft has been discovered beneath the Earth on an island near the coast of China.  Crysis uses Microsoft's new DirectX 10 for graphics rendering, and includes the same editor that was used by Crytek to create the game.  Consider it the pretty version of Far Cry.

The Aliens vs Predator franchise is considerably old in video game years dating back well in to the 80's.  Over the years the gameplay and graphics have improved to keep up with the latest technologies including DirectX 11 and Tessellation.  We are using the AvP performance benchmark with two custom config files for this benchmark.  The config files reduce overall resolution and show scores with DX11 on and off.

XviD Movie Encoding Test: This is a new test that was added to cover other sections of real-world performance. The test consists of a simple task of encoding a DVD rip from VOB to AVI with AutoGK 2.45 using the XviD codec. The movie used is the first chapter of Dirty Pair Flash #2 and consisted of 40104 frames. The time shown is how many frames per second were processed during the first pass to encode the video files.

Bapco SYSmark 2007 is a true real-world benchmarking suite that tests whole system performance by running through a series of real programs while recording the results.  These programs include: Adobe After Effects 7, Adobe Illustrator CS2, Adobe Photoshop CS2, AutoDesk 3ds Max 8, Macromedia Flash 8, Microsoft Excel 2003, Microsoft Outlook 2003, Microsoft PowerPoint 2003, Microsoft Word 2003, Microsoft Project 2003, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 series, Sony Vegas 7, SketchUp 5, WinZip 10.0

PCMark Vantage is a system benchmark from the makers of 3DMark.  It uses a variety of 2d tests to determine an overall computer score based on your system configuration.  The PCMark score is completely portable however to recreate it the score completely you will need almost identical hardware.  

Our real world benchmarks are designed to illustrate a cross section in performance that covers gaming, video encoding, content creation and everyday office applications.  Our results are pretty straight forward with no real surprises.  Overall we can conclude that the Sandy Bridge architecture is indeed faster than the previous edition mostly due in part to the extremely fast memory controller.

We did replace the Quake 4 benchmark with Aliens vs Predator which might have been a little pre-mature given how little the scores changed across the different platforms.  The funny thing is, Quake 4 showed exactly the same thing so maybe it is just the bench and these particular systems.