Far Cry 2

Publisher: Ubisoft

Far Cry 2 is the latest first person shooter from Ubisoft, and while it continues the Far Cry franchise that Crytek started in 2004, this game is built on its own in-house engine and has no association - other than its name - to anything Crytek has worked on or is working on now. We used a retail version of the game patched to version 1.02, and used the in-built "Action" gameplay demo set to the lowest settings under DirectX 9.



Basic gaming performance is not wonderful however. At stock speeds it's comparable to the competition, however overclocking does no see any kind of advantage the other motherboards offered and the ECS board sits clearly at the bottom of the table. Clearly the bottleneck is the frame buffer that's located in main memory and the extra CPU-NB and HT performance from other boards helps alleviate this.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Publisher: Activision

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is different to all previous Call of Duty games, as it moves the action out of the World War II era and into the modern day. We have used the full version of the game with the 1.7 patch applied.

The game runs on a proprietary engine, which includes features like true world dynamic lighting, HDR lighting, and dynamic shadowing, however for our purposes here we only enabled depth, bullet impact marks and RagDoll effects. All the other settings were set to Medium or Normal, and the anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were controlled from inside the game, and turned to their lowest settings.



Surprisingly Call of Duty 4 sees a consistently high minimum FPS on the ECS board and despite the low average FPS in comparison to other motherboards tested, it yielded a consistently smooth and playable performance. Again, we see no advantage from overclocking though.