ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion and X79 Professional Review: From a Gamer to Gamers

The X79 Fatal1ty boards had some small issues related to gaming worth noting in this section.  Starting with the Champion, it should be noted that the fourth PCIe slot would never engage in PCIe 3.0 – even when set in the BIOS, it would drop down to PCIe 2.0 x8 in the operating system.  On the Professional, PCIe 2.0 was enabled by default, meaning all the results here were performed at PCIe 2.0.  To make matters worse, every now and again the Professional would reduce one of the GPUs to PCIe 1.1, requiring a restart to bring it back up to speed.  This is an unfortunate set of events for any gaming motherboard.

Metro2033

Metro2033 is a DX11 benchmark that challenges every system that tries to run it at any high-end settings.  Developed by 4A Games and released in March 2010, we use the inbuilt DirectX 11 Frontline benchmark to test the hardware at 2560x1440 with full graphical settings.  Results are given as the average frame rate from 4 runs.

Dirt 3

Dirt 3 is a rallying video game and the third in the Dirt series of the Colin McRae Rally series, developed and published by Codemasters.  Using the in game benchmark, Dirt 3 is run at 2560x1440 with Ultra graphical settings.  Results are reported as the average frame rate across four runs.