Foxconn 975X7AB-8EKRS2H Motherboard Review

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. This game has some awesome graphics and is primed for use with next generation video cards. The only drawback is that the game comes with no default timedemo, so we recorded one and used the 2.0 shader for the benchmark. For those of you wanting to try this benchmark for yourself we can make the demo available, simply drop us a line.

Quake4 is the latest installment in a long line of "Quake" games from id Software. While the storyline is more in line with Quake2 the game engine is taken from Doom3. Together they make for a very exciting game with some pretty amazing graphics. For this benchmark we're using the v1.2 patch and included nettimedemo id_demo001. To run this demo pull down the console and type "playnettimedemo id_demo001", when complete pulldown the console again to see your score.

Far Cry. This game is very similar to Serious Sam in that the maps are huge and have a ton of things to shoot. Granted the graphics are quite a bit better and the water textures are something to die for. For this benchmark we used the regulator demo and the following command line. "FarCry.exe -DEVMODE "#demo_num_runs=1" "#demo_quit=1" "#r_Width=800" "#r_Height=600" "map regulator" "demo regulator""

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 2.27 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.

The best of the best when it comes to real world benchmarks, this free program is available from eTesting Labs and uses real programs to test the overall performance of your computer. These programs include: Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1, Adobe Premiere 6.50, Macromedia Director MX 9.0, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 6.1, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980, NewTek's LightWave 3D 7.5b, and Steinberg WaveLab 4.0f.

Business Winstone is quite similar to the Content Creation benchmark but uses programs that you would most likely use in the office. These programs include Microsoft Access 2002 SP-2, Microsoft Excel 2002 SP-2, Microsoft FrontPage 2002 SP-2, Microsoft Outlook 2002 SP-2, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 SP-2, Microsoft Project 2002, Microsoft Word 2002 SP-2, WinZip 8.1 SR-1, and Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003.

Our real world benchmarks are designed to illustrate a cross section in performance that covers gaming, video encoding, content creation and everyday office applications. As was shown in the synthetic performance section the Core 2 Duo pulled ahead in every test which is surprising since the only change between the systems was the processor.