Earlier this year when we visited Gigabyte during CES they reiterated something that they said about three years ago. They are committed to providing a much better performing product and are gearing themselves more and more toward the enthusiast and gamer’s market. We have watched them make this shift since we first started working with them back in early 2005. Now 6+ years later we can say they have made this transition well. Their lineup has become much more diversified with a good separation of products. We have already shown you some of the top end boards like the G1.Assassin2 and the X79-UD5 and have goe though the design and features of the X79-UD3 so now we can tell you how this board really performs. Let’s take a look.
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 3 for DX9 FarCry 2 for DX10 and Battlefield Crysis 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 Gigabyte X79-UD3 did very well with Modern Warfare 3. We saw minimum frame rates between 38-41 FPS which gave the game a smooth quality to it. We are working on filling in the other game data but so far it looks like the UD3 is performing as well as any of our other boards with the same GPU.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.For FarCry2 we find that the UD3 is nipping at the heels of the other boards we tested. The delta from top to bottom (at stock speed) was only 9FP this is almost unnoticeable at these speeds which is good for the UD3.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 nanosuit 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.Again we see solid performance from the UD3 considering the game and the GPU we are using. Gaming wrap-up -The X79-UD3 performed about average for an X79 motherboard. We were expecting a little more from this to be honest, but considering the frame rates we did see we are confident that it would work well as a gaming board if that is what you are looking for. We were impressed with the audio we were able to get once we started tweaking the settings with the Dolby utility. This actually added a nice touch to the game play which more than made up for the lower frame rates (especially since they were all well about 32FPs minimum).
