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ASUS M3A78-T AMD Motherboard

Author:	Matthew Homan
Date:	2008.08.26
Topic:	Motherboards
Provider:	AMD
Manufacturer:	Asus

ASUS M3A78-T AMD Motherboard

Doom 3

Doom3

About Doom 3:

Very similar to previous versions of Doom, you play an anonymous marine who was sent to a base on mars for a routine mission. Scientists on the base were exploring a set of ruins where they made a discovery of a set of tablets. On these tablets were records that the martians once found a type of teleportion device that lead to hell. Finding this out too late, the development was invaded by demons, and you find yourself forced to fight your way to safety.

Benchmarking Doom 3:

Before we talk about how we are going to benchmark Doom 3, lets first define some programs and features we will be taking advantage of.

FRAPS: A benchmarking tool that records the FPS of your active window, namely Doom 3, and adds that information to a spreadsheet. Once finished recording it will tell you the minimum, maximum, and average frames per second of what it was recording.

Time Demo: A pre-recorded set of data recorded from true game play. The time demo will be replayed by the game engine as if you are playing it your self, it will then time how long it takes the render the entire record. At the conclusion of the test it will report the number of frames rendered, how long it took to render, and the average frames per seconds.

Since benchmarking our actual game play will produce a different result each time, we decided to use a timedemo. Using this timedemo will produce results that make the comparison between different products easy and accurate. Luckily, Doom 3 comes with a pre-recorded timedemo called "Demo1", in order to run this demo you must first open the command prompt by pressing and holding Ctrl, Alt, ~, once open type "timedemo <DemoName>". Thus said, we will be using both the built in benchmark and fraps to benchmark the timedemo to try and get an accurate reading.

Benchmark Results:

Doom 3
Ultra High Settings, with Anti-Aliasing Off : 1024 x 768
Min FPS	Max FPS	Avg. FPS	High Quality Special Effects: Yes Enable Shadows: Yes Enable Specular: Yes Enable Bump Maps: Yes Vertical Sync: Yes
21	48	34
Built-in Benchmark: Time Demo Results 2148 Frames rendered in 63.3 Seconds 34 FPS

Doom 3
High Settings, with Anti-Aliasing Off : 800 x 600
Min FPS	Max FPS	Avg. FPS	High Quality Special Effects: Yes Enable Shadows: Yes Enable Specular: Yes Enable Bump Maps: Yes Vertical Sync: Yes
1	64	28.7
Built-in Benchmark: Time Demo Results 2148 Frames rendered in 66.9 Seconds 32.1 FPS

With Doom 3, we set the the game to High at 800x600 and received 32.1 frames per second. Knowing those results we figured we would try and up the settings to Ultra High and the resolution to 1024x768, with these settings we obtained 34 frames per seconds. Both of these are considered playable, they might have some small kinks and lags at some points, but able to play the game. The ASUS M3A78-T comes with the three slots for LSI video cards, so if one wanted to and had the money, they could add additional video cards to provide the ultimate gaming results.

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