 Unreal Tournament
2003 |
Source:
Epic |
|
Unreal
Tournament 2003 is the sequel to 1999's multiple 'Game of the Year' award
winner. It uses the very latest Unreal Engine technology - where graphics, sound
and game play are taken beyond the bleeding edge. Unreal Tournament 2003 employs
the use of Vertex as well as Pixel Shaders and it's recommended that you use a
DirectX 8 videocard to get the most out of the game.
UT2003
confirms what the other 3D benchmarks suggest, nVIDIA motherboards perform best
with nVIDIA videocards. Of course performance with ATi videocards is still very
good.
It was a smart move for AMD to integrate
the memory controller onto the processor, that guarantees that even low end
Athlon64 systems meet a certain level of performance. Of course with that done,
it's a lot more difficult for manufacturers to differentiate themselves.
People gave nVIDIA a hard time when the first
nForce3-150 was released, and rightly so. Compared to the competition, the
NF3-150 was outdated. It had no native Serial ATA/RAID, no Gigabit ethernet and
let's not forget about the slow HyperTransport subsystem.
Seems like nVIDIA took all those complaints to heart
because the nForce3-250Gb includes everything we'd ever want and more; Serial
ATA and IDE RAID, an onboard Gigabit NIC
that has its own dedicated bus, AGP/PCI locking and a 1 GHz HyperTransport link!
It's all quiet on the critic front. ;-)
The MSI K8N Neo-FIS2R Platinum is an excellent
board to work with and is fully loaded too. The layout of the board is great and
really the only thing that irks me about the board is the placement of Serial
ATA slots one and two. The NF3-250Gb now has the fastest HyperTransport links of
all the competition, nVIDIA's solution runs at 1 GHz and is 16 bits wide both up
and downstream. In theory that means that the NF3-250 should be able to get data
to and from the processor and the various other devices quicker than the
competition. While that's great, in reality it really does not do much for
desktop applications yet.
In the end, the performance of the MSI K8N Neo-FIS2R
Platinum motherboard was excellent. It's easily the fastest Athlon64 board we've
tested to date. The benchmarks improved even further when we used a nVIDIA based
videocard, but even when with a Radeon 9800XT, performance remains very nice
indeed. The board is not in the retail channels just yet so we're not sure how
much it costs, but MSI usually price their products aggressively.
If you're an AMD Athlon64 user, make sure you check out
the MSI K8N Neo-FIS2R Platinum motherboard! It's based on the nForce3-250Gb
chipset, and it is fast and full of the features you need!
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