EVGA Z68 FTW Motherboard Review

AMD CrossFireX Gaming Performance

As with the previous page where we tested the NVIDIA SLI scaling between the chipsets, we want to do the same for the AMD CrossfireX. When we decided to run this series of tests, we were able to get in touch with our friends over at XFX and they kindly sent over a pair of XFX Radeon HD 6950’s.

The single card performance of the EVGA Z68 FTW was right on track with what we have seen in our other systems. The top performing system was the ASUS P9X79 Pro and the Intel Core i7 3960X, and at 1280×1024 was able to average 56 frames per second. The EVGA Z68 FTW and the Intel Core i7 2600K was able to average 55.5 frames per second. Tossing in the second XFX Radeon HD 6950 the performance of the EVGA Z68 FTW jumped to 105.8 frames per second which is a gain of 90.6% while the greatest gain that we saw was the new Intel X79 platform with 99.5%. Increasing the resolution to 1920×1080 the EVGA Z68 FTW was able to average 40.9 frames per second with a single XFX Radeon HD 6950 and 79.7 frames per second in CrossFireX.

The EVGA Z68 FTW was the second slowest system in Metro 2033, at least in single card performance. Once we added in the second XFX Radeon HD 6950 the EVGA Z68 FTW climbed the charts. At the lowest test resolution of 1280×1024 the EVGA Z68 FTW had a single card performance of 44.26 frames per second and a CrossFireX performance of 76.1 frames per second. That’s an overall gain of 71.9%. Increasing the resolution to 1920×1080 the EVGA Z68 FTW had a single card performance of 32.57 frames per second. Setting the systems up in CrossFireX the EVGA Z68 FTW saw a boost of 24.67 frames per second which is a gain of 75.7%.

Our Intel systems clearly dominated in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat. The Sandy Bridge and Sandy Bridge E platforms were able to maintain a solid lead over the previous generation Intel X58 system. Running our benchmark at 1280×1024 all of the Intel systems were within less than 2% of each other with a single XFX Radeon HD 6950, once we set up our AMD CrossFireX configurations we saw the game change. At 1280×1024 the EVGA Z68 FTW performance jumped by 58.2 frames per second for a gain of 53.9%. Increasing the resolution to 1920×1080 the EVGA Z68 FTW jumped to 121.6 frames per second in CrossFireX from 75.4 frames per second in the single card configuration.