Gaming
Our gaming tests set out to find games that were heavily CPU dependent in order to test for platform differences. Games at higher resolutions with more emphasis on the GPU won’t show us any differences, if they exist.
These tests were not run in any SLI vs.CrossFire modes as we will be getting to that later.
FEAR v1.03
We ran FEAR at 1024×768 with the CPU settings at maximum and the GPU settings at medium to show any performance differences off of the GPU.
Call of Duty 2 v1.01
We ran CoD2 at 1024×768 with the GPU settings at Medium.
3DMark06 v1.02
This benchmark is used by many in the enthusiast crowd to compare their systems so we decided it would be good for our readers if we included numbers from our test system here as well.
The gaming scores on the Asus P5B Deluxe are pretty good and competitive with the scores from both of the 975X motherboards.
CrossFire Support
As of the Catalyst 6.9 drivers released last week, and with a beta BIOS that Asus supplied us with (they claim it will be available this week), Asus and ATI are bring CrossFire multi-GPU technology to the Intel 965 chipset and the Asus P5B Deluxe. Users who already have this motherboard will be glad to know their board now has a new feature, free of charge. And users who were thinking about getting a 965 motherboard, but were also interested in CrossFire, will now see this technology as a permanent feature.
Now this doesn’t apply to other P965 motherboards; at least not yet. Its up to the board vendors to update the BIOS and support the feature.
In my testing though, I had no problems setting it up after I set the the secondary PCIe slot to x4 speed. I played several games for some time to make sure the system was stable and CrossFire performance was there. The 3DMark06 result (default settings) was 8770 using the X1900 XT CrossFire configuration. You can see that it works well!
