Gamespot Throws Dual Quads At UT3

[hal]

Got some money to burn? Gamespot puts Intel's new D5400XS motherboard to the test, benchmarking the likes of Unreal Tournament 3 - one of the handful games to scale well with multiple cores. This beast comes with support for dual quad cores and both Crossfire and SLI GPU solutions. With identical settings, UT3 hits 161 frames per second compared to 135 with just a single quad core.

 

[MonsOlympus]

What a monster of a mobo! Looks like this thing would be power hungry, 24pin + 2x8pin connectors not to mention the 4x or 2x 6pins for the gpu's

But hey, its fully worth it for the extra 30fps in UT3

 

[GTD-Carthage]

I've just bought a Dual Core and I'm suddenly five years out-of-date already.

 

[Deapblade]

What a monster of a mobo! Looks like this thing would be power hungry, 24pin + 2x8pin connectors not to mention the 4x or 2x 6pins for the gpu's

But hey, its fully worth it for the extra 30fps in UT3

One quatcore extra is worth 30 fps? I'd say it isn't worth it.

As a side note, even with such an uber nasa comp, crysis still doesn't have a stunning framrate. I know their engine only supports 1 one core or 1 dual core but even then I still think that it's ridiculous that it can only run on 57 fps with such a machine. I don't know where you guys draw the line with fps numbers, but as far as I am concerned I want my games to run between 50 and 60 fps, and I don't want to buy such an animal just to get a game running properly.

 

[haslo]

I like the comment about who this MoBo currently is good for: Those who like to multitask and simultaneously encode video and play games

That's bound to change in less than a year though of course

 

[T2A`]

Why would they "throw" eight cores at UT3 when Epic already said the engine barely gives work to any more than two?

I've just bought a Dual Core and I'm suddenly five years out-of-date already.

Current processors are at least two or three years old. I'm pretty sure the copyright date on my brand new E6850 is 2005.

 

[toniglandyl]

wow !
well if you don't want to upgrade for a long time, that's what you want

let's hope the drivers are optimised though.

 

[MonsOlympus]

Well there is something to note here about the socket that its an lga771 not an lga775, so perhaps the socket itself was designed before the 775's or they went back and revised something.

Maybe lga771 is what intel are working towards now, Id be guessing this is aimed more at a hardcore gaming or server market, although I do wonder what use sli and crossfire are for servers. Maybe its a modified server board aimed at hardcore gamers, but I do wonder if this does have a good upgrade path or if it would cause you more hastles than its worth in the long run compared to lga775 boards.

 

[hal]

One quatcore extra is worth 30 fps? I'd say it isn't worth it.

As a side note, even with such an uber nasa comp, crysis still doesn't have a stunning framrate. I know their engine only supports 1 one core or 1 dual core but even then I still think that it's ridiculous that it can only run on 57 fps with such a machine. I don't know where you guys draw the line with fps numbers, but as far as I am concerned I want my games to run between 50 and 60 fps, and I don't want to buy such an animal just to get a game running properly.

That's because Crysis fails at proper multithread support. Also, 130 -> 160 is a pretty healthy increase imo.

Why would they "throw" eight cores at UT3 when Epic already said the engine barely gives work to any more than two?

Where did you read that? I clearly recall Tim Sweeney saying it would spawn threads for up to eight. Obviously, the benchmarks in the article back that up to a degree.

 

[SkaarjMaster]

Interesting...........this is the chip I'm looking at for my new system:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115035

Of course, I'll watch the price over the next few months and see what happens.

 

[RaptoR]

That's because Crysis fails at proper multithread support.

It's also a massively GPU-bound game. Crysis benchmarks with two Skulltrailed 9800GX2's should be interesting though

 

[MonsOlympus]

Well the crysis benchmarks only went down 2fps when encoding video so its obvious to me that its not using those cores at all otherwise there should have been a considerable fps drop.

Even though UT3 is using all 8 cores it seems, I dont think it would be using 100% of those cores so adding more load shouldnt affect fps too much. Its probably being capped out due to load balancing, so the question here is what would the fps be like upwards of 32 bots (if thats what the tests were run at), one would think that you could run upwards of 64 bots fairly easy on that setup. It would be interesting to see what the framerate does with more load though

 

[WarTourist]

UT3 is definitely CPU bound if you have an 8800. I'm not at all surprised this results in big perf boost.

 

[FlashIV]

Also, 130 -> 160 is a pretty healthy increase imo.

But you're capped at 90 online regardless of how many you can crank out.

HardOCP actually got the opposite results when comparing a QX9770 and the Skulltrail.

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTQ1OCw1LCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA

the Skulltrail motherboard uses FB-DIMMs. FB-DIMMs are slower than the un-buffered DDR2 1066MHz modules in the comparison system. Given that some games are often memory bandwidth intensive, the Skulltrail should actually lose to the EVGA 780i SLI/QX9770 system since that system is running 1066MHz modules.

I didn't read the whole GameSpot article, did they just remove one of the CPU's from the motherboard to do their comparisons?

 

[Sabo]

Skulltrailed

haha a verb

 

[nELsOn]

I've just bought a Dual Core and I'm suddenly five years out-of-date already.

that's kind of what i thought as well with all the quad cores hitting the market and especially this article.
but then again, the difference in fps between 1x quad and 2x quad doesn't quite seem enough for me to consider buying another cpu even if i was in the position to (namely having the mobo and the money). apart from that i'm not sure if there are all that many app's/games that really make use of a single quad core right now let alone two of them.

EDIT: btw - i couldn't see a reason why they tested on 1024x768. does anyone know why they did that?

 

[EdWinchester]

Rather interesting that they did take time to make that apparently correct, when more or less the rest is only partly working

 

[[USSR] dunnie!]

ROFLZ

 

[MonsOlympus]

EDIT: btw - i couldn't see a reason why they tested on 1024x768. does anyone know why they did that?

because they were testing the CPU's and not the GPU?

 

[[DUF]-Fragger]

That motherboard is a bit of an overkill for games imo, but i'm no expert so what do i know

Gr Fragger