Unreal Tournament 2003

UT2K3 s a real system killer, and can bring many systems to its knees. We used the , which are excellent tools in testing various resolutions and detail levels. We selected the CPU test, which uses the dm-inferno map.

No surprises here.

Quake 3 Arena, 640x480

It's getting old, I know, but Quake 3 is still a decent benchmark for almost anything. For motherboards and CPUs, we run at the lowest settings and fire away.

Same trend as we've seen with UT2003.

Jedi Knight 2, 640x480

So far, with the gaming benchmarks, we're seeing that the IC7 is best paired with a Pentium 4 800FSB CPU. Using a 533FSB CPU, the performance does exceed that of the i845PE, but to be honest, you're not going to be getting your money's worth.

3D Mark 2003

We're still up in the air about 3D Mark 2003 here at VL. I'm not a big fan of the summarized scores, but there are a couple of areas of the benchmark I do find useful. Today, we'll be doing the CPU tests.

What you see above is a summary, but it doesn't really tell you anything. Let's take a look at individual tests.

Here we can see that the same trends we've seen with our real-world game benchmarks are mimicked here. The scores are a bit closer in the CPU tests #2, but the same scaling is present.

Subsystem Testing

The first thing we'll check is the audio. We downloaded and installed to test its CPU utilization.

CPU utilization was fairly high though DirectSound3D tests. CPU utilization never got to 10%, but it did average in the 5% - 7% range, which is a lot higher than the <2% averages we've seen with the nForce 2. It's not the end of the world, given that the slowest CPU you would ideally be using with the IC7 is a 2.4GHz "C", but we would have liked to have seen lower numbers. This is a synthetic benchmark though, and since I know all of you enjoy a game or two, let's see how the sound will affect UT 2003 performance.

The [H]ardocp Tool has an option to enable and disable sound during testing. Tests will be done with the same hardware configuration as the rest of the benchmarks, except we'll only be displaying the Pentium 4 2.4GHz "C" numbers.

UT 2003, Minimum Detail, 640x480 Resolution

Here we can see the IC7 loses quite a bit of performance with the onboard sound enabled. Before any of you start getting too alarmed, I seriously doubt many of you prefer to play at such low detail settings. Let's try something more realistic.

UT 2003, Maximum Detail, 1280x1024 Resolution

Here we can see that the sound, on or off, has little effect if you play at a more reasonable resolution. My take on this? Yes, CPU utilization is higher than I would like, but it should not affect gameplay much at all.

In terms of sound quality, I found gaming to be very acceptable, and ever since Scott posted in our forums how much he enjoyed Evanescence - Fallen, I've been listening to that quite a bit as well. The music is a mix of calm and fast paced rock, and the singer's haunting vocals played out quite well through my Logitech THX Z-560's.