PCMark Vantage
Futuremark’s newest benchmark suite, PCMark Vantage, was released in 2010 we published an initial article on the new software that looked at some CPU performance as well as providing overviews for all the individual testing suites it uses and what kind of applications they emulate. The Vantage software takes a much more real-world user-scenario approach to testing that previous PCMark software and as such deserves more time our benchmark analysis.
Our PCMark Vantage results give us a good overall view of a motherboard’s strengths and weaknesses in a variety of areas that are important to PC users. The GA-E350N-USB3’s strengths in these benchmarks seemed to focus around the hard drive and gaming tests. However, it really fell behind the ECS E-350 board in most of our benchmarks, which doesn’t give us a warm fuzzy that the GA-E350N-USB3 is ready for primetime against other boards in its class.
Can this thing handle source
Can this thing handle source games? css, dods, etc
It all depends on your
It all depends on your settings and resolution, but I would say YES it can play them at something like 720p with moderate quality settings.
It should be able to play
It should be able to play those. I didn’t try those two games when I had my E-350, but it did play Portal 1 and 2 at 1920×1080. 2 was barely playable at that resolution on low-medium settings, but 1 ran better (20-30 FPS).
Would this board be able to
Would this board be able to record a couple of shows at once to WMC with a ceton cablecard tuner?
That is a little hard to say
That is a little hard to say with certainty without having that hardware here but I would tend to say yes for dual streams. What software would you be running it on?
Why no media file tests?
Why no media file tests? Seems a large oversight to not test HD Netflix, 1080p MKV files, SOMETHING! How would this board work if actually used as an HTPC?
I agree with above, most
I agree with above, most people will be using this as an HTPC. Some HD playback test would be nice.
yes i would like to also see
yes i would like to also see some hd play back tested as i would love to get ahold of one of theses boards for a htpc on board hdmi at 1080p and windows 7 media center with 4 tv tuners would like to see how would hold up?
I bought this motherboard
I bought this motherboard back in March and used it until last month as my HTPC, so I’ll give a quick overview of my experience with it.
Gaming: I ran a few games on it at 1920×1080, low-medium settings. It performed better than I thought it would. I played the following games on it:
Portal 1/2
Trackmania United
World of Warcraft
Video/HTPC: The fan on it is near-silent, even at 3500 RPM. More than a foot or so away from it, it’s inaudible. Video playback worked fine with XBMC, and I was able to play 1080p MKVs with no dropped frames, and low CPU utilization (Make sure to enable DXVA in XBMC settings!). Netflix in Firefox worked fine for SD content, I think HD/720p was okay as well but I didn’t check for sure. YouTube 1080p was straining it quite hard, but 720p was fine.
Power consumption/overclocking: Using the included PSU with an Antec ISK300-65 case, it idled at ~24w and loaded at ~34w. This was with 2×2 GB G Skill low-voltage DDR3-1333 @ 1333, 7-7-7-21, 1.38v; and a 250 GB/7200 RPM Samsung 2.5″ HD.
As for overclocking, it topped out at 1.73 GHz for me as well.
Hope this helps :).
Whoops, forgot to mention I
Whoops, forgot to mention I played Live for Speed on it as well. It ran that at 35-50 FPS.