Benchmark Results: Modern Warfare 2 And Crysis
This tester normally disables any unused drive controllers that have boot BIOS to reduce boot time, but doing so was a problem for ASRock’s X58 Extreme3. Disabling the SATA 6Gb/s controller by itself resulted in the lowest performance, while disabling both it and the USB 3.0 controller brought us closer to performance levels of competitors. This source of this problem was discovered after the article was published, the board was retested with both controllers enabled, and both sets of results (both controllers enabled, both controllers disabled) are presented in the updated charts.
Performance differentiation diminishes as graphics details are increased, indicating the aforementioned issue is related mostly to the CPU.
Asus has lead Gigabyte in three of the four tests so far, which makes sense because Asus runs its 133.3 MHz base clock setting at 133.6 MHz, while Gigabyte underclocks it to 133.0 MHz. It’s worth noting that Gigabyte also overclocks on-the-sly when builders set the base clock to “Auto,” rather than manually selecting 133 MHz.