Gigabyte MA-785GPMT-UD2H Motherboard

Testing – 3DMark Vantage

Futuremark has been in the business of PC benchmarking for a while now, coming out with a new version of their popular 3DMark software every time Microsoft creates a new major version of DirectX. Though the emphasis of this suite is strongly slanted towards GPU performance, there’s a fairly intensive CPU benchmark section that also gives a good idea of motherboard performance–after all, it’s what the CPU and GPU use to talk to each other and the rest of the world. It doesn’t tell you much about real-world gaming performance, since real-world games benefit from heavy optimization both from their developers and the people writing the drivers. That said, there’s something to be said for knowing where your system stands in the pecking order. So, here’s how our test system fared:

Testing – PCMark Vantage

PCMark is Futuremark’s attempt to move away from a purely game-focused benchmark, and towards something that tests how well your computer will do with other performance intensive tasks. Since the only other tasks most people will do that fall into the category of “stressful on hardware” are transcoding and playback of HD video and multichannel audio files, that’s mostly what PCMark Vantage focuses on. As with 3DMark, the emphasis is not on emulating real-world results, so much as it is establishing your system’s place in the pecking order. Here’s where our test system ended up:

Testing – CrystalMark2004

CrystalMark is more of a homebrew effort than most benchmarks, being written primarily by a fellow who goes by the nom de Net of hiyohiyo. That said, it’s also very thorough about testing all the basic computational abilities of the CPU and the throughput of the memory and motherboard chipset. It’s also possible this will give a more honest look at performance, since no hardware manufacturers will have thought to optimize for it.

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  Previous Page         1. Intro2. Features3. Specifications4. Packaging5. A Closer Look6. Test System, Bios, and Overclocking7. Included Software8. Testing, part 19. Testing, part 210. Onboard Graphics11. Thoughts and Conclusion12. View All         Next Page