Foxconn Black Ops - Raw, Unadulterated Power

Standard Performance Results

Futuremark's PCMark Vantage is probably the single most diverse set of benchmarks that can be run on a system to mimic real world usage scenarios. The TV and Movies, Gaming, and Music Suites can be frighteningly difficult to pass when a system is overclocked. We've had boards in the labs that will pass hours of Prim95 torture test or OCCT that fail even the basic 30 minute run of PCMark Vantage let alone the full 1 hour and 30 minutes test run. We used similar components for both stock 9.5x333FSB and absolute maximum stable settings at 8x500FSB to see how the Black Ops compares to the ASUS P5E3 Premium.

PCMark Vantage scores

Due to its tight setup, the Black Ops surges ahead in almost all areas, with the Communications suite showing an especially large gain over the P5E3 Premium. It's still unlikely that one would really notice the difference in real world applications, especially in those apps that spend most of their time waiting for user input.  We had some additional questions about our ASUS Striker II Extreme and MSI P45 Diamond results that should be cleared shortly.  We will update our benchmarks at that time to include these chipsets.

Crysis Benchmark

The Crysis graphics engine remains the standard by which all new games, 3D engines, and graphics cards are judged. Highly detailed environments present massive loads to the PCI-E lanes and saturate the MCH and memory banks with a flood of data. Any system weakness or instability is often uncovered within the first loop of the Assault Demo.

UT3 Benchmark

The highly addictive Unreal Tournament 3 remains a favorite lab game to unwind from the rigors of putting products through their paces. The UT3 engine is highly sensitive to memory access latency, often showing gains favoring a tighter performance level (tRD) setting over outright FSB speeds. A fun and frantic online playing experience demands smooth frame rates with no slowdown under load. We chose to run the Coret_Fly demo due to its back-to-back performance accuracy between runs.

Game Comments

It's the usual story at the end of the regular benchmark runs: all the boards are within a couple of percent of one another, with the DDR2 based DFI board trailing only by virtue of reduced memory performance on the older platform. The remaining factor is that both the Black Ops and ASUS P5E3 Premium are inherently more stable at 500FSB than any of the competitors in the graphs, making them a better choice if you can't live without reaching 500FSB.