ASUS P5GD2-Premium Motherboard

Testing: Gaming

FarCry 1.3

FarCry is a very popular game using the CryTek Graphics Engine and the latest DirectX 9 technology. For benchmarking on this game, we used all four included timedemos to playback a pre-recorded level as fast as possible. We set the screen resolution to 640×480 and also set all image and texture quality to the lowest possible settings to take as much stress off the video card in an effort to isolate the rest of the system’s performance.

It is also worth noting that these results may not be 100% accurate to actual FarCry game-play. This is because the FarCry demo implementation only records and re-plays the path your character takes while recording the demo. So there is no interaction between the enemies or shooting of the enemies while running the timedemo.

Half-Life 2

Half-Life 2 is yet another popular game which was branded as the “most anticipated game of the year” in 2004. We used our own custom, “in-house” demo and the built-in timedemo feature to playback the demo. We again used a 640×480 screen resolution with the lowest possible image and texture settings.

Doom 3

Doom 3 is again a very popular game which is known for its dark levels and system-stressing capabilities. While this benchmark is probably limited by our X600 video card, we still included it for the curious crowd out there who would not consider a benchmark suite complete without it.

Comanche 4 Demo

Comanche 4 has been around for quite some time and is well known for its built-in benchmarking capabilities, but not so much as a game itself. Nevertheless, for gaming benchmarking purposes, we used a 640×480 screen resolution to give another respected result to compare these two systems.

Gaming Benchmark Results

Throwing out the insanely graphics intensive Doom 3 results and the tied Comanche 4 results, FarCry and Half-Life 2 show the Intel i915 reference board consistently and significantly leading the ASUS P5GD2 Premium. I am convinced that this is once again an effect of the increased number of onboard devices found on the P5GD2 Premium. While it should be known that you could not claim the “fastest gaming motherboard” with the P5GD2 Premium board in your system, I will also note that this performance difference in the gaming area is not going to be noticed while actually playing any of the games tested above.