Budget Micro-ATX P55 Faceoff: Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 and ASRock P55M Pro
by Gary Key on October 5, 2009 12:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
FarCry 2
Featuring fantastic visuals courtesy of the Dunia Engine, this game also features one of the most impressive benchmark tools we have seen in a PC game. We set the performance feature set to Very High, graphics to High, and enable DX10 with AA set to 2x. The in-game benchmark tool is utilized with the Ranch Small level and we report an average of three test runs.
Left 4 Dead
This game is a blast and addictive to boot - provided you like killing hundreds of zombies while trying to take care of your teammates and sustaining high blood pressure rates. We enable all options, set AA to 2x and AF to 8x, and play back a custom demo of a game session from the Runway Finale chapter within the Dead Air campaign.
Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II
We are big fans of the Warhammer franchise, especially Dawn of War II. One of the latest RTS games in our library is also one of the more demanding titles on both the CPU and GPU. We crank all options to High, enable AA, and then run the built-in performance benchmark for our result.
Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.
While not a true flight simulation or even serious air combat game, it is a lot of fun and looks visually stunning on a 30” monitor with all options turned up. In our case, we set all options to high, enable 2xAA and DX10, and then use FRAPS to time a custom demo sequence. We run three loops of the benchmark and average our scores for the results.
Crysis Warhead
We utilize the Ambush level for our game test. We set the resolution to 1680x1050 with 2xAA, DX10, and 64-bit enabled.
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Gary Key - Monday, October 5, 2009 - link
The PCIe lanes coming off the P55 are 2.0, the problem is that they are running at 1.x speeds (2.5GT/s). On these two boards, the x16 slot is off Lynnfield and will not be affected by any card placed in the x4 or x1 slots off the P55.Mr Perfect - Tuesday, October 6, 2009 - link
I should probably know this, but what does a 2.0 slot running at 1.x speed bring to the table that a 1.x slot doesn't? Does it provide more power or something?MadMan007 - Tuesday, October 6, 2009 - link
Yes I was half right with my post and nothing Gary said was technically wrong it's just misleading. They are PCIe 2.0 spec slots but running at half speed, this is clear from Intel's chipset disgram. It's really a farce to call them PCIe 2.0 though because the overridingly most important change from 1.x to 2.0 is the double bandwidth, there are other changes like the power rating I believe and maybe some low level changes but nothing major. I think it's false advertising to call them PCIe 2.0 personally because they don't fully conform to the spec.In any case I'd still like to know how many lanes the main CPU-based slot retains when a 1x or 4x card is placed in a secondary CPU-based PCIe slot. Anandtech seems to be more receptive to odd little investigations like this so I hope Gary will check it out.
james.taylor - Monday, May 10, 2010 - link
Hi Gary, Thank you so much for this informationjames.taylor - Monday, May 10, 2010 - link
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