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We'll wrap it up with a
benchmark round from Unreal
Tournament 2003. We utilized a simple benchmark
script that does "Fly
By" demos on the Antalus, Asbestos and Citadel levels. We set the resolution to
640X480, so as to
take as much of the workload off the GeForce4 as possible
and place it on CPU and System Bandwidth.
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Unreal
Tournament 2003 |
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DirectX 8 Gaming Performance |
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Again here we
see some pretty impressive numbers. The Leadtek seems
to pull away from the Chaintech in the Asbestos fly by, but
again with numbers this high it's only a 1% lead, which is
completely unnoticeable to the end user. After running
through the numbers, we can't really say that one of the
boards really dominated. They both showed solid
numbers across the test runs and would be great boards for
anyone looking to get into the AMD scene or upgrading from
an older board.
After running
this second generation nForce chip through the trenches and
back, it's easy to see the improvements from NVIDIA's first
crack at it. The biggest improvement being the Dual
Channel DDR or "TwinBank", as NVIDIA likes to call it.
The 128-bit DDR memory bus gives us the opportunity to
compete bandwidth wise, at the level of Pentium 4 platforms and the
i850E
chipset. What's not to like about this? We're
talking about an AMD platform that delivers blazing
performance at a significantly lower price point. I have
to say that Dual Channel DDR is what everyone has been
waiting for and after running these tests, we see that it can
perform. Now it's a matter of playing the waiting game,
to see if the other chipset giants such as VIA or SIS will put
out a Dual Channel solution to compete with NVIDIA's
nForce2. For now, I think we can all agree we have a
winner with the nForce2 chipset.
Chaintech
7NJS Zenith Analysis:
Where can I start with the Chaintech board? There is so much
to talk about.
For starters, It has great features and an amazing bundle. The Chaintech is impressive from the start,
right after opening the
box. You get rounded IDE cables, a front panel with
USB 2.0 and Firewire ports and a Firewire card. Not to
mention everything is gold plated for a nice look, although
that opinion will vary with each individual. This
motherboard's features left nothing out. We have SATA RAID,
10/100 Ethernet LAN, FireWire, and USB 2.0, AGP 8X, and
official DDR400 support. All this comes at a price
though and the Chaintech does have a price entry point well
above most motherboards in its class, but the value is
there. I would have liked to see a second Ethernet
jack to take advantage of the 3Com Ethernet MAC, but we made do.
Finally, overall performance was excellent. Although
we didn't get the overclock we'd like to see in such a
feature-rich motherboard, I wasn't using aftermarket cooling
or PC3500 memory modules. With that said, this is a great board for anyone looking
to assemble a top
of the line AMD platform.
We're giving the
Chaintech 7NJS a HotHardware Heat Meter rating of...
Leadtek
K7NCR18D-Pro:
What the the Leadtek lacked in its bundle and feature
set, it made up for in performance. While we didn't see
all the fancy trimmings that came along with the Chaintech
board,
we did get a solid standard issue package. The Leadtek
performed as well as and even better, in some cases, than
the Chaintech board. There are some shortcomings with the
board though. Again, we'd like to see a second
Ethernet jack, but if you are looking for a board that is
going to be able to support the upcoming technologies, the Leadtek doesn't have it right up front. With the lack
of SATA or RAID, if you need this feature, you're talking about having to buy an
adaptor, which adds to the total cost of the package. On the
upside however, you're
getting a very stable, well built product that offers some
great features such as AGP 8X, USB 2.0, IEEE-1394a Firewire,
and official Dual Channel DDR400 support. In addition,
all this
at a great price. When you can have the Leadtek at
about $80 cheaper than the Chaintech, that add in SATA or
RAID card
doesn't seem so bad after all.
We're giving the
Leadtek K7NCR18D-Pro a HotHardware Heat Meter rating of...
Discuss this
or any other Hot Hardware Review in the PC Hardware Forum!
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