It’s A Fake Real World
In our final test, I decided to run through to our other PCMark Vantage tests. This should make a nice summary to what we’ve seen so far, as these tests place emphasis on particular tasks instead of raw performance data. The Composite test is a rating of overall system performance, testing multimedia functions, productivity, and even some minor gaming. In this the MSI 790FX-GD70 came in last place by about 3%, which is strange considering our next tests.
We focused on the two most used benchmarks in the PCMark suite; TV and Movies, and Productivity. As one would guess, the two suites test multimedia and office based applications respectively. Here the MSI board makes up some ground, coming in the middle of the road between the ASUS and GIGABYTE boards.
I Got Game, But Does The Motherboard?
Having enough with office apps, productivity, and raw performance numbers, I figured it was time to test out some games and see how the MSI board fared under the most stressful of activities. To get things going we ran benchmarks using each of the three highest test suites in 3DMark Vantage. Here the MSI board basically performed exactly the same as all the other boards. This is most likely due to the reliance on the video card for this test. There are only CPU specific test in the entire 3DMark Vantage run. The rest places some intensive amounts of stress on the GPU.
Crysis
We wanted some real world results, so it was time to break out Crysis and see if we could break the board. Crysis is a fairly intensive game for a computer to run, with plenty of things from the GPU, CPU and RAM to do. AI processing, terrain rendering, and adaptation of the game to what you are doing are all things this title requires from a system. It’s nice to see that the MSI board pulled through, posting the highest frame rates of all three boards on 1680×1050, and posting the same numbers as our GIGABYTE board on 1920×1200. The MSI board is definitely showing its value.
World in Conflict
Distinctions became a little more clear cut for the MSI board when we turned to the RTS title World in Conflict. Since this is an RTS, there is more emphasis on processing and less on 3D. Though everything is still rendered in 3D, the amount of things going on and being done by the computer are a much larger consideration. The MSI 790FX-GD70 was the clear cut winner in these tests, if only by a couple percentage points. It still managed to post the fastest framerates across the board in our tests. So with the in mind, we better wrap this review up.