For our second review of 2011 we thought we would take a look at a P67 board (despite all the drama). We chose the Asus P8P67 WS Revolution. This board (like you did not know) is part of Asus’ workstation line up, but that does not mean that it is boring. In fact the WS Revolution is anything but boring. It has been built with the professional enthusiast in mind. You get items like an NF200 chip to help support three way SLI and Crossfire, a 92% power efficiency rating, multiple SATA 3.0 ports (supported by Intel and Marvell), and dual Intel GBe LAN ports. But there is more to it than just the sum of its features. You also get an improved VRM (voltage regulation module), thicker traces for better signal transfer and quite a bit more. With all of this waiting to be tried out, let’s quit the intro chatter and dive into the P8P67 WS Revolution.
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 2 for DX9 FarCry 2 for DX10 and Battlefield Bad Company 2 for DX11.Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 DX9 -This is an excellent but short game that put you right into the action from the beginning and does not let up the pressure until the very end. The graphics are a little better; most notably the night and thermal imaging have been improved. The AI is still the typical COD “bar fight” style AI, with maybe a tad more finesse. All in all it is not a bad game to play and a decent one to use for testing. Our testing run starts at the bridge and ends after you clear the school in the first level of the game. Settings are shown below as are the performance numbers.
All I can say about the numbers here is… Boring! I mean look at the delta in combination with the lowest minimum FPS. I know someone is going to say, “Then pick a rougher game” the problem with that is Modern Warfare 2 is still popular as are many DX9 games. 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 the numbers are a little less boring but they are still fairly close. Then again this game was developed in cooperation with Intel so it does lean on the CPU a little more than many games. Still it is important to note that any of these platforms would give you a good gaming experience from an FPS standpoint.Battlefield Bad Company2 DX11 –I have liked many of the Battlefield games. They usually tend to be fast paced and fun. With Battlefield Bad Company 2 you do get some of that, but there is something about the graphics and the movement that just does not sit right. The AI is a less sophisticated form of the bar fight AI, but it gets the job done. Still, the game is good for testing as it can put a strain on the components of the board. Out testing run is the entire first level, from beginning to end. Settings are shown below along with the raw numbers.
Well look at this; after all the talk from AMD about integrated platforms we and how their systems when combined we good for gaming we see an example. Yes, we do have to point out that Bad Company 2 was developed in cooperation with AMD for the 5xxx series GPUs but. It is still interesting to see this when Intel has the upper hand in so many other performance tests. Once again, the delta between the systems is close enough that you should get good performance out of any one of these.Gaming wrap-up;What can we say about gaming that the numbers have not already shown? Well there is lots to say really. There is audio performance, networking, and general speed of the system. The Asus P8P67 WS Revolution does very well on all of these. The audio was good with regular speakers and also did well with headphones (although without a headphone amp it is not as good as it could be). The networking performance was top notch when gaming online and the general speed was great, no lags in loading up the levels or anything like that. Despite being aimed at the workstation crowd the Revolution would make a pretty good gaming platform too.
