Athlon64 Motherboard TripleThreat

For our next series of tests, we chose Futuremark's 3DMark2001SE and the newer 3DMark03.  While there is still some controversy surrounding NVIDIA's driver optimizations, they are a good test for motherboard reviews since the same video card is used with each system.

As we suspected, the results did balance out between the three systems, with the ASUS board maintaining a slight lead over the other two boards.

With 3DMark03 the picture was the same, with the ASUS board posting the best result with the MSI and Shuttle boards running neck-in-neck.  Ultimately, the results are very close and no one would be able to notice the difference in everyday use.  It seems that NVIDIA and VIA are truly competing on the same level with each other.
 

There is nothing like using real games to assess a system's performance.  Two games that are ideal in this type of situation are Quake 3 and Comanche4.  First we loaded up the default Comanche 4 benchmark with No Audio selected, then we ran the Quake 3 Demo Four with the fastest settings enabled.

With Comanche 4, the three systems were running a very close race with the ASUS board taking a 1 point lead over the other systems.  With Quake 3, the scales tipped in favor of the ASUS and Shuttle boards with the MSI dropping around 30FPS compared to the other two.  Again, like we said earlier, this is hardly a major strike since these speed differences would not be noticeable in everyday use.  The bottom line is these systems all offered top end performance.