At almost the opposite end of the spectrum from the Asus Maximus V Gene (in terms of target market) we find the Asus P8Z77-M Pro motherboard. The P8Z77-M Pro is also a micro ATX board and despite being aimed at the lower end of the consumer market it shares some of the same features that the Gene has. You still get Asus’ Digi+ power controls and FanXpert+ along with Asus’ commitment to solid design and component selection. We have talked about most of these items in Part I of our review. Now we are going to focus on the performance you can expect when you pick up the P8Z77-M Pro along with Intel’s new Ivy Bridge CPU.
Section IV Performance,GamingGaming as a test of motherboard performance is sort of a joke these days. The big player in the gaming arena is the GPU. Everyone but a few hardcore PR teams know this. However, it is important to run at least a few (one from each current DX version) to see if there are any issues with the combination of components on a motherboard. These are items like Audio lag, memory lag and of course problems with the PCIe lanes and signal traces. If there are issues in design, drivers or BIOS then you can have odd gaming performance. So without much more preamble let’s dive into the three games we currently use; Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 for DX9 FarCry 2 for DX10 and Battlefield Bad Company 2 for DX11.Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 DX9 -As the third installment in the Modern Warfare franchise you are picking up some old roles while adding a couple of new ones as well. The game play is almost identical to what you are used to in Modern Warfare 2 as are the graphical settings. The AI is a little different thought it is still similar to the bar fight style AI we like in the Call of Duty series. For our testing we run the first mission (Black Tuesday) from start to finish. Settings are shown below
The Asus P8Z77-M Pro does very well running under the IGP when playing Modern Warfare 3 at 1920x1080. When we dropped in our HD8570 it fell behind, not drastically but enough that you would might notice it if you were paying very close attention.FarCry2 DX10 -Although not one of my favorite games this tedious game does have some good graphics. The large sandbox style of the game lends to mission based play. The only problem is that the AI is rather low grade. Still the more CPU power the more the bad guys try to do. Over all the game was a little bit of a disappointment to play, but still not a bad DX10 representation. Our testing run starts right after you get your first mission to clean out the safe-house and ends after the hostage rescue. Settings and performance numbers are shown below.
Although we would not recommend playing FarCry2 on the Intel GMA4000 we did just to give you a point of reference. Under the strain of the DX 10 engine in FarCry2 we saw the M Pro lag a couple of FPS behind the other two Z77 boards. Of course all of them were like watching a slide show so you would never know it to see them side-by- side. The same thing can be said for the frame rates when running the HD5807.They honestly were so close that it would not matter in the real world. Crysis 2 DX11 –Another sequel Crysis 2 follows up on two other Crysis games (making the title a little misleading). You take the role of a Force Recon Marine who is given a battle suit by a character named Profit (you will remember him from the other two Crysis games). From there you run around an Infected and Invaded New York City trying to survive and, of course, save the planet. For our testing we ran through the first “mission”. Settings are shown below.Crysis 2 was not playable on any of our Z77 motherboards running the GMA4000 (which is ok as it is not meant to run games like Crysis 2). Even so for some reason the M Pro took a bigger hit than the other two with frame rates that were almost half what we saw on the others. Conversely the M Pro managed an upset when we had the HD 5870 running. Again it is important to note that the delta here is so small that you would never know it if they were running side-by-side.Gaming wrap-up -If you were thinking of getting the Asus P8Z77-M Pro for a small and inexpensive gaming rig you would not have made a bad decision. It can game quite well with the right components in the system. The audio is not the best you could hope for, but you do have room to a solid add-in card if you just have to have the best audio for your games. The Network iControl function was a benefit here as well. We were able to get a couple of games added to the priority listing quite easily which did give us a slight improvement on ping times during online game play. If you were thinking about using the IGP for gaming; well you can do that, but remember that it was designed more for multi-media playback with some mainstream gaming support. Do not expect to run the Asus P8Z77-M Pro with any of the Intel GMAs with games like Crysis2 it was not what Intel meant them for.
