Far Cry 2
Featuring fantastic visuals courtesy of the Dunia Engine, this game also features one of the most impressive benchmark tools we have seen in a PC game. For single GPU results we set the performance feature set to Very High, graphics to High, and enable DX10 with AA set to 2x.
The MI-T36 gives up a couple of FPS here, which are within the bounds of variance between repeated benchmark runs.
Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II
We are big fans of the Warhammer franchise, especially Dawn of War II. One of the latest RTS games in our library is also one of the more demanding titles on both the CPU and GPU. We crank all options to Ultra, enable AA, and then run the built-in performance benchmark for our result.
Resident Evil 5
For our final game benchmark we decided to add the Resident Evil 5's fixed time demo, running DX10, Ultra settings and 4xAA.
DFI's offering is hot on the heels of the big boys in our gaming suite. What you're giving up by using it for a gaming system is the ability to keep up with ATX sized boards that can hold 4GHz CPU speeds day in and day out. In most benchmarks this equates to a performance disparity of around 5% between stock and 4GHz on the current Intel platforms.
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yacoub - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Is Gary Key still writing for Anandtech? I noticed he hasn't posted in a while and his email address @anandtech bounced the other day, though I've successfully emailed him there before and gotten responses.If he left, where did he go? His motherboard reviews were usually thorough, superb, and very much appreciated.
(Your review is fine, I am just wondering what happened to Gary Key.)
JarredWalton - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
I can confirm that Gary left us to go work for someone else last month. I'm sure he'll still read the site, but his new job prevents him from writing for us now. We wish him the best, though!yacoub - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Ah okay, thanks for the update. I guess he's working for one of the companies who make products you guys review, not another news site? :)JarredWalton - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Yeah, I thinks it's okay for us to mention he's at ASUS now.yacoub - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Oh very cool! :)vol7ron - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
I like to see more reviews of mini-ITX. Cases and boards.This is the year of the HTPC.
DigitalFreak - Monday, January 4, 2010 - link
Surprisingly enough, the price isn't bad. $134 @ Newegg.fr500 - Tuesday, April 6, 2010 - link
Hi anandDid you tell DFI about the reboot loop problem, S1 works fine but the GPU fan ramps up to 100% on S1 so it's unusable, and S3 has the aforementioned problem of random waking up and get stuck in a reboot loop.
S3 is VERY important on an HTPC board imho. S4 works too but it's still too slow for day to day usage.
If it can't be fixed guess I'll have to clock down to stock overclocking via software when gaming or get a passive cooled GTS250 instead of the current active cooled one.