Shuttle SN25P XPC (nForce 4 Ultra)
Unreal Tournament 2004 & Doom 3
To start our in-game testing, we did some low-resolution benchmarking with Epic's Unreal Tournament 2004. When testing with UT 2004, we use a specific set of game engine initialization parameters that ensure all of the systems are being benchmarked with the exact same in-game settings and graphical options. Like the other in-game tests in this review, we used a "Low-Quality" setting with UT2004 that isolates CPU and memory performance.
 |
|
The Shuttle SN25P XPC scored another first place finish in our custom Unreal Tournament 2004 benchmark. Its score of 155.82 frames per second was marginally faster then the other nForce 4 Ultra based motherboard, the MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum, but it was about 3% faster then the nForce 4 SLI.
 |
|
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...
Our custom multi-player Doom 3 benchmark had the nForce 4 SLI rig finishing in first place, followed by the nForce 4 Ultra based K8N Neo4 Platinum and nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition reference motherboard. And although the SN25P XPC trailed slightly behind all of the other systems here, the approximate 2 frames per second separating it from any of the full-sized rigs is nothing to get excited about.
