Gaming Performance
Because of the fact that gaming tends to be more GPU dependant, the games were run at the lower resolutions via in game settings to take the stress off the GPU subsystem. Since performance deviances in CPU and memory bandwidth speeds are more pronounced at lower resolutions, while performance deviances in GPU speeds are shown at higher resolutions. All gaming tests were run at resolutions to avoid bottlenecking the GPU and thus allow a memory bandwidth performance picture to develop. The Crysis 1.05 benchmark tool was employed to ensure consistency in the game runs, while FRAPS was used to gauge performance in manual walkthroughs in the HL2 EP2 game. The same levels were played, as closely to the same manner as possible, to maintain consistency there as well. Call of Duty 4 was run using the TPU bench program available on The Tech Report.
The boards held very similar performance levels down the line. The slightly lower memory bandwidth didn’t produce any detrimental performance effects.
