Section IV Performance – Gaming
Gaming 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 3 and Total War Napoleon for DX9 and Civilization V 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.

Gigabyte’s Z87X-UD3H did very well during our testing with Modern Warfare 3. We had a minimum frame rate above 32 FPS. This is very good for an internal GPU considering the resolution we were running at. Overall game play was good with no stuttering or major issues in performance.

Total War Napoleon DX9 -
Napoleon Total War is a turn based strategy game that puts you in charge of Napoleon’s army during the height of his power. The game has some very interesting strategic systems although it can be boring when you are moving units into place. One of the more interesting things about Napoleon Total war is that the more CPU power you have at hand the better the game performs. This is because the system AI is dynamic and improves based on the resources available. For our testing we ran through the Lodi campaign. You can see the settings below.

Under Total War Napoleon we saw the Z87X-UD3H was well behind competition, at least at stock speeds. When we overclocked the CPU to 5GHz it pulled out in front again with some excellent frame rates.

Civilization V DX11 –
Civilization V is a strategy game that pits you against other world leaders. You must advance your civilization and try to beat your opponents through military prowess, scientific achievement, or just lasting longer than they do. For our testing we ran through 30 minutes of game play using the same country and leader. We mapped out a city and production strategy attempting to move through the game the same way during all three test runs. You can check out the settings below along with a screenshot.

Civilization V is a lot tougher on a system than you would think. The way it renders is also unusual as there are times when the frame rate will drop to zero even with higher end GPUs. This is because there are times when the system pauses on a still image with no frame refresh. Looking at the performance using average frame rate the Z87X-UD3H comes in second place by 7FPS under stock speeds and pulls ahead by almost 3 FPS while running at 5GHZ.

Gaming wrap-up -
The Z87X-UD3H running with the 4770K all on its own did quite well in our game tests. The frame rates were more than acceptable with the game we chose. Audio performance fell into the “good enough” category, but will still do the job for you. Of course the HD4600 is not meant as an enthusiast GPU so we would not recommend that you keep this if you want to play more demanding games.