P45 Showdown – Asus P5Q Deluxe vs MSI P45 Diamond
The ‘must have’ online multiplayer FPS of 2007/8. This is the fourth incarnation of Infinity Wards best-selling series and is set to become a stalwart of the FPS genre. The training sequence was run 5 times with the fps being recorded via Fraps and the average fps then deduced. All settings were set to the maximum possible for this test and were then run again with CrossfireX enabled (below).
F.E.A.R. is a game based on the Lithtech Jupiter EX engine. It has volumetric lighting, soft shadows, parallax mapping and particle effects. Included in the game is a benchmark facility that taxes the entire PC system. This benchmark was run a total of 5 times, with the highest and lowest results being excluded and an average being calculated on the remaining 3 results. All settiings were set to the maximum possible for this test and were then run again with CrossfireX enabled (below).
Oblivion from Bethseda is now an ‘old’ game by today’s standards, but is still one of the most visually taxing games out there. The benchmark was run in the wilderness with all settings set to the maximum possible. Bloom was used in preference to HDR. The test was run five times with the average FPS then being deduced.
Result Observations
It is clear that CrossfireX has a distinct advantage when all the settings are maxed out. The most astonishing difference was to be had in F.E.A.R. in which the setup more than tripled the FPS! The CoD4 and F.E.A.R. engines seemed to favour the MSI board, yet Oblivion showed a greater bias towards the Asus board, with a 10fps difference when CrossfireX was enabled. It appears that the reduction to 8 PCIe lanes has little effect on the performance of the cards, so maybe there isn’t a need to upgrade to X48 just yet.
