ECS KN1 SLI Extreme: SLI on a Budget

Next we delved into the gaming side of things a bit and performed some low-resolution benchmarking with Epic's Unreal Tournament 2004.  We specifically used a "Low-Quality" game setting with UT2004 which allows us to isolate CPU and memory performance with little burden on the graphics subsystem.

Unreal Tournament 2004 DirectX 8 Gaming Performance

Here the two test scenarios continued to keep things close with less than 3 FPS difference between the ECS KN1 SLI Extreme and the MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI.

Benchmarks with Doom 3 OpenGL Gaming Performance

For our next game test, we benchmarked all of the test systems using a custom multi-player Doom 3 timedemo. We cranked the resolution down to 640 x 480 and configured the game to run at its "Low-Quality" graphics setting. Although Doom 3 typically taxes today's high-end GPUs, when it's configured at these minimal settings it's more CPU / Memory-bound than anything else...

With Doom3 testing, the ECS KN1 SLI Extreme pulled ahead of the MSI K8N Neo4 slightly more, taking a 7FPS lead over the "Platinum" series motherboard.