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.

	Frames per Second
IS7 - Pre Game Accelerator	247.62
IS7 - Street Racer	277.16
IS7 @ 3GHz	318.73
IC7 - Pre Game Accelerator	271.06
IC7 - Street Racer	281.85
IC7 @ 3GHz	328.88

No surprises here. The IC7 holds a slight lead over the IS7.

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.

	Frames per Second
IS7 - Pre Game Accelerator	266.4
IS7 - Street Racer	299.1
IS7 @ 3GHz	347.0
IC7 - Pre Game Accelerator	285.5
IC7 - Street Racer	304.2
IC7 @ 3GHz	355.2

Same trend as we've seen with UT2003.

Jedi Knight 2, 640x480

	Frames per Second
IS7 - Pre Game Accelerator	159.2
IS7 - Street Racer	178.1
IS7 @ 3GHz	202.8
IC7 - Pre Game Accelerator	174.5
IC7 - Street Racer	181.5
IC7 @ 3GHz	209.0

The IS7 makes a valiant effort in keeping up with the IC7, but it's clear that the Canterwood holds the fort. At Street Racer settings, the IS7 makes dramatic improvements, but so does the IC7 with the same settings enabled. Like the IC7, the IS7 shows excellent performance when overclocked, and it runs at these settings with total ease. Not bad for a chipset geared at the mainstream user.

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.

	CPU Test 1	CPU Test 2
IS7 - Pre Game Accelerator	60.1	10.1
IS7 - Street Racer	65.2	10.8
IS7 @ 3GHz	76.2	12.7
IC7 - Pre Game Accelerator	64.1	10.7
IC7 - Street Racer	66.2	10.9
IC7 @ 3GHz	78.1	12.9

As we've seen in the benchmarks today, similar performance between ABIT's implementation of the Springdale and Canterwood.

Subsystem Testing

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

Like the IC7's Realtek solution, CPU utilization was fairly high thoughout the 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

	Frames per Second
IS7 - Sound On	227.31
IS7 - Sound Off	247.62

It's plain to see that the CPU takes quite a hit when enabling the onboard sound. Keep in mind though that the settings used are not going to be ideal if eye candy is important to you. What happens when we up the resolution and detail level to settings most people would play with a similar setup?

UT 2003, Maximum Detail, 1280x1024 Resolution

	Frames per Second
IS7 - Sound On	92.198029
IS7 - Sound Off	92.191826

When it comes down to it, at high resolution and detail levels, the onboard sound's CPU utilization will not be a factor at all. For those of you who can spot a 0.006203FPS difference, my hats off to you, though eye doctors will wish you dead for your lack of business.

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.

Ed. Note: A reader pointed me in the where there seems to be some issues with the mic. I'm no singer, so I didn't test it, but it may be worth checking out. There is also some discussion about sound quality issues, but I have not experienced those myself.

Hard Drive Performance

I apologize for not having any SATA drives to properly test the SATA performance. Hopefully we'll remedy this situation in the near future.

ATA Performance (Regular IDE)

Performance is in line with the last Intel ICH5 we've tested. CPU utilization is 0.5% higher, but there are fewer spikes than the last time.

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