DFI LanParty Dark X48 Motherboard Review

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 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 4th game in the Unreal Tournament series that is exclusively designed for multi player action since there is no story mode game play.  While the game play 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 the CarbonFire Botmatch to record framerates.  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.  In a way it’s a pretty version of Far Cry that runs on Vista.

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.

Looking at a few different games here run in a lower resolution to keep the video card from taking over. We can see that the X48 is at a disadvantage compared to the X38. I thought this might have been the difference in the two video cards. Yet, the games are turned down enough in setting that the video card would have a very small effect. Then it became a little clearer that the lack of 2gigs of ram did this.

So while you look at the numbers and think WTH. Please keep in mind that the X48 system was lacking 2Gigs of memory. Even then you can get the idea that the X38 and the X48 are made of the same silicon. The numbers are still very close with the X38 being the winner however the lack of 2gigs of memory is a performance killer.

This also goes to show that the synthetic benchmarks only show a small portion of the truth.