Gaming: 3DMark06 and Left 4 Dead
3DMark06
A reliable and popular benchmark, 3DMark Vantage can provide a good insight into overall gaming performance of a system.

Zotac IONITX-A-U NVIDIA ION Motherboard Review - Motherboards 55

Zotac IONITX-A-U NVIDIA ION Motherboard Review - Motherboards 56

Left 4 Dead (DirectX 9)

Developed by a new team of Valve’s, Left 4 Dead is a single or multi-player game that encompasses the most automatic story for a shooter: zombie apocalypse.  The team aspect of the title, based on Valve’s Source engine, really makes this a unique gaming experience that I think all PC gamers should be required to play.

Zotac IONITX-A-U NVIDIA ION Motherboard Review - Motherboards 57

Zotac IONITX-A-U NVIDIA ION Motherboard Review - Motherboards 58

Zotac IONITX-A-U NVIDIA ION Motherboard Review - Motherboards 59
  Left 4 Dead settings

Zotac IONITX-A-U NVIDIA ION Motherboard Review - Motherboards 60

Zotac IONITX-A-U NVIDIA ION Motherboard Review - Motherboards 61

Our actual gaming results look much better for the ION platform in comparison to our cheap AMD solution – in 3DMark06 the scores between the Zotac IONITX-A-U and the AMD X2 7750 are neck and neck even though the CPU results are very different.   Left 4 Dead shows a slight edge to our ION gaming configuration as well which is very impressive consider the power consumption differences we’ll see on the coming pages.

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