ASUS Striker II Extreme: Mucho Bang, Mucho Bucks

Game Testing - Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts

Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts arrived last year and remains one of the best samples of the genre we have ever played. We find the game to be extremely GPU intensive and a hefty CPU is definitely required as well. This title contains a built-in performance test that makes use of the game engine, generating several different scenes representative of the in-game experience, which we believe provides a very good indication of just how well the system will perform during actual play. We use the DX9 rendering engine for testing purposes as the DX10 code path can quickly bring even the fastest system to its knees.

Unlike some other titles we have tested, Company of Heroes shows signs of being GPU-limited at lower resolutions (1280x1024) where the CPU is usually the bottleneck. Increasing our E8500's frequency alone from 3.16GHz to 4.00GHz did little to improve frame rates. The game did however exhibit excellent performance scaling with the use of two 8800GTS 512MB (G92) graphics cards in SLI. Once again, the two newest 790i boards had no trouble distinguishing themselves from the pack, outscoring the 780i- and 750i-based boards clock-for-clock by as much as 10%.

Moving to the higher 1920x1200 resolution undeniably places a larger share of the performance burden on the graphics subsystem. While average frame rates do decrease, scaling with SLI enabled comes very close to the magical, theoretically maximum of a full 2x increase in performance.

Even our quad-core QX9770 showed gains with Company of Heroes, demonstrating why this gaming engine deserves all the praise we can muster. The two 790i-based motherboards continue to hold a solid 10% lead over the similarly configured 780i board as well. In fact, the EVGA 780i board is unable compete at the highest 4.0GHz overclock - we just could not manage to keep the board stable long enough to complete the benchmark.

At 1920x1200, the quad-core results closely resemble those taken from the dual-core testing, which supports our earlier statements regarding the heavy GPU limitations at this resolution.