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For our set of
gaming benchmarks we used the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo,
Halo - Combat Evolved, and Aquamark 3. This will give
us a feel for both Direct X and OpenGL gaming performance.
To take as much stress off of the graphics subsystem as
possible and put the overall system bandwidth and compute
power to work, we ran the benchmarks at a 640x480
resolution.
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Gaming Benchmarks |
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DX8, DX9 and OpenGL Gaming Performance
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Using a custom
"Fly By" benchmark for Unreal Tournament 2003, we did a
test on the Citadel level. Both boards are once
again neck and neck, although at overclocked speeds we're
seeing the DFI motherboard pull away a more significantly.
Perhaps this has something to do with the memory subsystem
of the DFI motherboard again and if that's the case it
shows that DFI has taken the extra time to really tune
this board and get as much as it can from it performance
wise.
Following the
Readme file provided with Halo, we ran a timedemo at both
default and overclocked speeds. Once again the
motherboards are chugging along hand in hand. The
DFI board once again shows a slight lead in this
benchmark. More noticeable is how the overclocked
scores are barely ahead of the default settings which
points to the fact that this game is highly dependent on
the graphics subsystem regardless of the resolution.
Auqamark 3 uses a DirectX 9
enhanced gaming engine, along with some DX8 and DX7 pixel
shader programs. Once again we set the resolution to
640x480. Continuing with the trend, the DFI LANParty
motherboard manages an ever so slight lead at both the
default and overclocked settings. The overclocked
scores managed to outpace the default scores by a bigger
margin this time which shows system bus bandwidth is an
important factor when running Aquamark 3.
Besides the
chipset of these two motherboards being the same, they are
quite different when looking at the details. It's
obvious from an enthusiast point of view that the DFI
LANParty NFII Ultra B motherboard offers an all around
package that is hard to beat. While the ABIT AN7
doesn't have all the bells and whistles its competitor had,
it shines as well where it matters most, in performance.
Throughout the benchmarks these two motherboards were almost
dead even with a slight advantage going to DFI. Maybe
only a small point to fret over was the memory subsystem
performance of the ABIT AN7 motherboard, but again this can
be easily resolved with a simple BIOS revision in the
future.
Deciding on a
motherboard is never easy, but in this case we think the
decision is easier because each board will appeal to a
different audience. Only the true enthusiasts among us
will be able to completely appreciate what the DFI LANParty
solution has to offer: 4 SATA ports, Dual LAN, a distinctive
look and an amazing bundle. The price point of the DFI
motherboard is higher, currently around $145 or so while the
Abit AN7 lists for around $105. However, the NFII
Ultra B's price is right in line with what you are getting
in return. The ABIT AN7 motherboard is in most ways
your basic run of the mill nForce2 Ultra motherboard, but
certainly performs better than average and shouldn't be
overlooked with its powerful "ųGuru" overclocking feature.
Each motherboard offers its own special feature for
overclocking. DFI offers its CMOS Reloaded feature,
while ABIT sports its ųGuru processor and "On the Fly"
overclocking. We feel the ųGuru system is not as
mature as we'd like to see it yet, but it's a stride in the
right direction and will work well enough for most uses.
So in the end, it comes down to performance. While
both motherboards performed admirably, the DFI LANParty NFII
Ultra B did manage to outpace the ABIT AN7 by a hair in
almost every benchmark. From our standpoint we'll
conclude that both of these motherboards are great products
overall, delivering performance and features proportional to
their respective price points.
We're giving
the DFI LANParty NFII Ultra B
a HotHardware Heat Meter rating of:
And the
ABIT AN7
also scores a Heat Meter rating of:
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