We upgraded Quake 4 to version 1.3 and ran its multiplayer demo id_demo001 at 1024x768x32 with image quality settings configured at ”low“ four times. The first result was always discarded, and from the other three values, we discarded the highest and the lowest score, i.e., we used the middle value for our comparison. You can see the results below.

Here is where we could see some performance difference between the reviewed motherboards. When we configure our memory to run at 1,066 MHz, MSI P965 Platinum was 4.83% faster than Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3, but achieved the same performance level as ASUS P5B. When we configured our memory to run at 800 MHz, these three motherboards achieved the same performance level.

MSI P965 Platinum was 5.97% faster than Intel D975XBX2 and 15.03% faster than Intel D975XBX when our memories were running at 800 MHz and 11.81% faster than Intel D975XBX2 and 21.43% faster than Intel D975XBX when our memories were running at 1,066 MHz (on Intel motherboards the memories were always running at 800 MHz; it is also important to note that Intel 975X chipset does not officially support DDR2-800).