ASRock 775Dual-VSTA Motherboard Review

3DMark06

3DMark06 includes an array of 3D graphics, CPU and 3D feature tests for overall performance measurement of current and future PC gaming systems. With this broader design approach, 3DMark06 has become the benchmark of choice for all PCs with top-of-the-line graphics hardware and CPUs. 3DMark06 is the first product from Futuremark using the AGEIA PhysX software physics library in two very complex, game-like threaded CPU tests conceived to measure properly performances of single processor, multi-core and multiple processor systems in next generation of games. In addition to using real-time physics, both CPU tests also employ multi-threaded artificial intelligence algorithms. By combining the results of the two CPU tests and four graphics tests, 3DMark06 enables users to get a 3DMark score which reflects the overall gaming performance of their PC.

The first of our gaming performance tests, 3DMark 06 clearly favors the Intel motherboard, performing 9.9% faster. The great thing about 3DMark06 is that it breaks down the scoring so you can actually tell where possible differences in performance are.

The Bad Axe has a solid 9.5% lead here. Notice that the increase in memory speed has almost no affect on SM 2.0 results.

SM 3.0 results don’t change from SM 2.0 with Intel leading peformance but it does so by an even larger 15% margain.

Interestingly enough, the CPU is not what is holding back performance in 3DMark as the ASRock is consistently faster than the Intel. After seeing the CPU scoring it becomes very clear that the lower performance difference is due to the 4x PCI-E video slot.