Gigabyte GA-880GMA-UD2H Motherboard Review

Quake 4 is the latest installment in a long line of "Quake" games from id Software. While the storyline is more in line with Quake 2, the game engine is taken from Doom 3.  Together, they make for a very exciting game with some pretty amazing graphics. For this benchmark we're using the v1.2 patch and a benchmarking program from Guru3D called HOC_Q4Bench.  We're using the id_demo001 for this benchmark on medium quality at 800x600 to minimize any performance gains from the video card.

If you wish to run this benchmark manually you can do the following:Pull down the console and type "playnettimedemo id_demo001".  When complete,  pull down the console again to see your score.

UT3 is the fourth game in the Unreal Tournament series.  It has no story mode gameplay and is exclusively designed for multiplayer action.  While the gameplay and weapons are similar to the UT2004 counterpart, the gaming engine is all new.  For this benchmark, we're using the UT3Bench tool from Guru3D, and CarbonFire Botmatch to record framerates.  The resolution was set to 800x600 to minimize any performance gains from the video card.

Crysis is based in a fictional future where an ancient alien spacecraft has been discovered beneath the Earth on an island near the coast of China.  Crysis uses Microsoft's new DirectX 10 for graphics rendering, and includes the same editor that was used by Crytek to create the game.  Consider it the pretty version of Far Cry.

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 2.45 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.

Bapco SYSmark 2007 is a true real-world benchmarking suite that tests whole system performance by running through a series of real programs while recording the results.  These programs include: Adobe After Effects 7, Adobe Illustrator CS2, Adobe Photoshop CS2, AutoDesk 3ds Max 8, Macromedia Flash 8, Microsoft Excel 2003, Microsoft Outlook 2003, Microsoft PowerPoint 2003, Microsoft Word 2003, Microsoft Project 2003, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 series, Sony Vegas 7, SketchUp 5, WinZip 10.0

Our real world benchmarks are designed to illustrate a cross section in performance that covers gaming, video encoding, content creation and everyday office applications.  

The results are pretty straight forward with no real surprises.  Again all of our tests were done using the same processor and memory combo, so the results should be almost identical.  Onboard video was flat in our game benchmarks however the scores using the GTX 260 shows us overall system efficiency comparable to our reference system(s).  In fact this is one of the reasons we still use Quake 4 as a benchmark since it is one of the few games that responds very well to memory bandwidth and timing changes, the better the tuning the higher the framerate.

There is a slight drop in our Xvid Encoding tests that appears to be chipset related, however still remains unexplained.   Finally the rather significant drop on our Bapco SYSmark tests can be blamed solely on our hard drive choice for this review, SATA3 vs SATA1 really hurts the productivity score.