NVIDIA's NFORCE3 250Gb - New Motherboards from MSI and EPoX
Gaming with UT2004 and Comanche4
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The latest addition to our testing library is UT2004. With UT2004, we have a custom demo that we recorded which we run with the video card set to 640x480x16. This eliminated the effects of the video card on the test results and allowed us to focus on the overall system / motherboard performance.
As with 3Dmark03, we're really splitting hairs, with the SiS755 holding the top spot over the EPoX board by approximately 2.5FPS. The MSI K8N Neo Platinum trailed the EPoX board by a mere 1FPS, holding roughly a 1.5FPS lead over the K8T800 board.
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Another test we like to run is Comanche4 simply because it is very dependant on the host CPU. In this test we left the system at the default 800x600x32 while selecting the "No Audio" option.
We didn't see much of a change in pattern between 3DMark03 and Comanche4. We should note, the EPoX board took the top spot this time around, by a slim margin over the SiS755 model. The K8T800 managed to slide into the third spot, beating the K8N Neo by a mere fraction of a FPS.
So far, we've seen a fairly consistent trend, with the NFORCE3 and SiS755 chipsets typically topping the older K8T800 in most tests. Next we'll see how the trend swings when we run some workstation class tests on each test bed.
