Intel X38 Express Chipset Debuts

For our last set of tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with Quake 4 and F.E.A.R. When testing processors and motherboards with Q4 or F.E.A.R, we drop the resolution and reduce all of the in-game graphical options to their minimum values to isolate CPU and memory performance as much as possible.  However, the in-game effects, which control the level of detail for the games' physics engines and particle systems, are left at their maximum values, since these actually do place some load on the CPU.

The results from our custom Quake 4 benchmark were pretty cut and dried. Overall the DDR3-equipped systems were slightly faster, but the deltas were nothing to get excited over.  This same performance trend played out in the F.E.A.R. benchmark as well, but in F.E.A.R. the delta were much more pronounced.