915 Motherboard Roundup: Socket 775 for the Rest of Us

DirectX 9 Gaming Performance

After the clustering of scores in Winstones, you may not have expected much variation in game benchmarks. That is why expectations get us all in trouble because there is a really a large variation in DX9 benchmarks. One thing is quite consistent across the DX9 tests, and that is the domination of performance results by the Asus P5GD2 and the Epox 5epa+. In every benchmark, either the Asus or Epox wins the test, and the other board is normally #2 or #3 in the worst case. Another board that is consistently at the top of the DirectX 9 benchmarks is the ECS PF4 915P Extreme, which will come as a surprise to many. It was certainly a surprise to this reviewer.

The other boards seem to shift positions in the middle, but we, again, have some consistency at the bottom of the performance results. The Soltek is consistently at the bottom of the performance charts, which certainly should not be a surprise, considering that it is the only board running our Fast DDR400 at DDR333 speed. We would expect that as soon as Soltek can fix this issue, the position of the Soltek will change relative to other boards in the 915 roundup.

One thing to keep in mind as you look at the benchmarks is the relative position of the top overclockers in this roundup. The Asus, Abit, Epox, MSI, Albatron, and DFI were our top overclockers in our tests, but clearly, they get to their high overclocks by different means. The MSI can reach 285 at the top, but is often near the bottom in stock performance. The DFI is pretty average at stock speeds, but it becomes a dynamo when challenged to an overclock. The Asus is a great overclocker, but it is also very fast at stock speeds. In other words, the Asus starts fast and stays fast through overclocking, making it a great choice for both stock performance and extreme overclocking.