3DMark06 measures Shader 3.0 (i.e. DirectX 9.0c) performance. We ran this software under its default configuration. For this test we also included the result achieved by a 64-bit Sapphire HD 3450 card installed on the motherboard PCI Express x16 slot and disabling the motherboard’s on-board video, so we can have an idea of the performance of a very low-end video card compared to the on-board video of the reviewed motherboard. We also enabled Hybrid Graphics, i.e. configured our Radeon HD 3450 to work in parallel with the on-board video in CrossFire mode, to see if there was any performance gain. The results you can see below.

On 3DMark06 the reviewed motherboard from ECS achieved a performance 26.55% higher than Sapphire PI-AM2RS780G (AMD 780G) and 143.77% higher than ECS GF8200A Black Series (nVidia GeForce 8200).

A very low-end Radeon HD 3450 video card was “only” 14.32% faster than the on-board video provided by AMD 790GX. Usually even very low-end video cards are far faster than on-board video solutions and it is a surprise to see an on-board video almost at the same level of an entry-level add-on card.

Enabling Hybrid CrossFire technology – which makes Radeon HD 3450 to work in parallel with the on-board video to increase performance – performance increased 54% compared to the Radeon HD 3450 alone with the on-board video disabled. This is impressive, because this 50%+ performance boost is gained absolutely for free.