Round-Up: Four Z68 Motherboards From $220 To $280

Benchmark Results: Crysis And F1 2010

Crysis is a lot of fun for benchmarking, mostly because it’s the oldest game we can find that still causes new hardware to choke. It is, of course, a real game that a few people still play, so this is not a synthetic test in the literal sense.

We’re looking for noticeable differences, but find none in Crysis. What about F1 2010?

Asus’ P8Z68 Deluxe really rocks the F1 2010 benchmark. The explanation for this is relevant, since you'll see the company winning over and over in the benchmarks as a result.

In essence, any time you manually set a memory or BCLK setting in the P8Z68 Deluxe's UEFI (and this applies as far back as P67-based boards, according to Asus, though this is the first we've seen of it), the firmware engages an automatic rule that sets Turbo Boost to its maximum level across all cores, even when all four are active and you'd normally expect to see fewer bins of added frequency. This rule can be manually overridden in the UEFI if you want to cut power use. Or, if you set the BCLK and memory to be configured automatically, the rule is not applied. Asus says this is actually a feature of the processor architecture's microcode, if a vendor digs deep enough. It was first revealed by an Intel engineer and purportedly does not go against any of Intel's guidelines. Based on our results, it'd appear that Asus is currently the only company utilizing it.

The effects aren't all positive, though. As you'll see in the power measurements, consumption goes up faster than performance with this rule applied. The good news is that, again, if you want, you can work around it and drop performance and power use to match the other boards in our round-up at will.