Half-Life 2 is a popular franchise and we benchmarked the video cards using Episode Two with the aid of HOC Half-Life 2 Episode Two benchmarking utility using the “HOC Demo 1” provided by this program. We ran the game under 1024x768 with no anti-aliasing and bilinear filtering, i.e., using the lowest image quality possible. The results, given in frames per second, you see below. This game was included to see how the on-board video from the selected motherboards would perform with an older game being run.

On this game Biostar TA785GE 128M achieved the same performance as Sapphire PI-AM2RS780G (AMD 780G), being a little bit faster (3.27%) than ECS A785GM-M (AMD 785G). ECS A790GXM-A (AMD 790GX with 128 MB) was 26.10% faster than the reviewed motherboard.

A 64-bit Radeon HD 3450 was 12.68% faster than the on-board video from the reviewed motherboard. When this video card was configured to run under CrossFire mode with the on-board video, performance increased 71.71%.