ECS A790GXM-AD3 (Socket AM3) DDR3 motherboard review

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Game performance - FEAR | BIA:HH |Crysis WarHEAD

Gaming: F.E.A.R.

As many of you will be aware, F.E.A.R. (or First Encounter Assault & Recon in short) involves a rather mysterious looking girl in a red dress, a man with an unappetizing taste for human flesh and some rather flashy action set pieces aka The Matrix. All of this is brought together by one of the best game engines around.

F.E.A.R. makes its cinematic pretensions clear from the start. As soon as the credits roll, and the music starts, you are treated to the full works. The camera pans across scores of troops locked 'n' loaded and ready to hunt you down, all seemingly linked to 'Paxton Fettel', a strange kind of guy with extraordinary psychic powers capable of controlling battalions of soldiers and a habit of feeding off any poor unfortunate innocents - presumably to aid his powers of concentration. It doesnt end there, after a short briefing at F.E.A.R. HQ you are sent off to hunt down Fettel equipped with reflexes that are 'off the chart'. These reflexes are put to excellent use, with a slow motion effect like that of Max Payne, or the before mentioned Matrix. But here, it is oooohhhh so much more satisfying thanks to the outstanding environmental effects. Sparks fly everywhere, as chunks of masonry are blasted from the walls and blood splatters from your latest victim. The physics are just great, with boxes sent flying, shelves tipped over, and objects hurtling towards your head. And the explosions, well, the explosions just have to be seen, and what's so great about this is you can witness it in all its glory in slow motion.

Let me confirm to you that based on this, F.E.A.R. will have you shaking on the edge of your seat, if not falling off it. The tension is brought to just the right level with key moments that will make your heart leap. Play the demo and you will see what I mean. The key to this, is the girl. Without revealing anything significant, lets just say that she could take on the whole of Mars for creepiness.

F.E.A.R. has a built in test which we used to measure performance, you should try it yourself, it's really fun to look and compare with our results. Yet F.E.A.R. after all this time still is a tough title for the graphics cards; especially when you configure it to maximum image quality. This game is heavily pixel shaded and shows some dark and creepy effects. 4xAA and 16xAF where applied here, and again the two competing platforms are dead on with each other performance wise.

Image Quality setting:

  • 4x Anti Aliasing
  • 16x Anisotropic Filtering
  • Soft Shadows Disabled

As you'll notice throughout the gaming sessions, the processor doesn't have to be made out of pure muscle once you pass the 1280x1024 resolution, to the contrary. Though tiny, some differences are measurable as I have selected a wide variety of multi-core processors and clock frequencies. The DDR3 platform holds up really well though.

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway

Hells Highway, another WWII shooter some might say. But in reality the setting of war is really just a vehicle for Gearbox to tell the storyline of a Band of Brothers which is led by you, Sergeant Matt Baker, as they deal with the madness and consequences of war. The game tells the story of Operation Market Garden in the country yours truly lives, in the Netherlands (aka Holland). It's about the besieged journey from Eindhoven to Arnhem where tremendous battles were fought.

Exactly that road, Highway 69; the road from Eindhoven to Arnhem was later nicknamed: Hell's Highway.

On of the most impressive details is that the area of Operation Market garden was completely reconstructed by historical documents and images. It's uncanny to see and experience the design of 1944 Holland. Even now in 2008 you can still see striking similarities of our country. Street signs, building structures, clothing, and even the clinker bricks on the roads dispense a true authentic mood. This reviewer is Dutch, so what level would be more appropriate than one of the starting levels, in a field in the Netherlands, moving towards a large windmill ahead of us. Lots of geometry is to be found here and in fact one of the more complex scenes to render for the GPU. Yes, welcome to Holland.

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway is an interesting title as it is using the Unreal 3 graphics engine. That engine is very multi-core optimized, but that by itself doesn't move mountains, as the faster clocked (2800 MHz) X3 720BE still outperforms the X4 810 (2600 MHz) and smaller L3 cache.

The game digs three or more CPU cores to flex it's gaming performance muscle. NIL difference between DDR2 and DDR3 though.

Crysis WARHEAD

As in last year's game, expect to encounter dense jungle environments, barren ice fields, Korean soldiers and plenty of flying aliens. There's no denying that this is more of the same, except here it's a more tightly woven experience with a little less freedom to explore.

With a top-end PC (although Warhead has supposedly benefited from an improved game engine you'll still need a fairly beefy system), rest assured, developer Crytek has enhanced more than just the graphics engine.

Vehicles are more fun to drive, firefights are more intense and focused, and aliens do more than just float around you. More emphasis on the open-ended environments would have been welcome, but a more exciting (though shorter) campaign, a new multiplayer mode, and a whole bunch of new maps make Crysis Warhead an excellent expansion to one of last year's best shooters.

Crysis Warhead has good looks. As mentioned before, the game looks better than Crysis, and it runs better too. Our test machine that struggled a bit to run the original at high settings ran Warhead smoothly with the same settings. Yet as much as you may have heard about Crysis' technical prowess, you'll still be impressed when you feast your eyes on the swaying vegetation, surging water, and expressive animations. Outstanding graphics. Couldn't say more here.

Our image quality settings; we opt for the gamers mode. However, we select DirectX 10 mode as well to allow way more hefty shader code which will take a big toll on the GPU, yet also frame buffer utilization.

  • Level Ambush
  • Codepath DX10
  • Anti aliasing 2xMSAA
  • Ingame Quality mode Gamer

Crysis WarHEAD is a game title that likes more than 2 CPU cores AND likes faster clocked processors very much. We can see proof of that with the Dual core X2 7750 BE @ 2700 MHz. It is for this reason we see much more fluctuation in the overall framerates compared.

But yes, as small as it is, here overclocking does matter. We gain a little additional performance, but only up to 1280x1024 after which one of the fastest single GPU based graphics cards on the planet becomes a bottleneck, slows down and normalizes the framerate.

And that is your reality for gaming. Even with a graphics card of this caliber, if you game at 1600x1200 the performance differences are horribly minimal as it's a stage where most processors will be fast enough.

Right, I think you guys have seen so many numbers that you must be getting a little dizzy, let's wrap things up and move onwards to our conclusion.

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