Vantec Nexus
Corsair TWINX4K
Corsair Hydrocool
MSI MEGA 651
MSI FX5900-VTD
RocketRAID 1520
RocketRAID 404
FIC AU13 nF2
LanParty KT400A

Unreal Tournament 2003

    We all know UT2003 for its beautiful graphics, and the game itself isn't too bad either.  The quality of the graphics is what brings many modern CPU's and video cards to their knees.  So therefore this is a good test to see how well both video cards and motherboards perform.  We used the Hard OCP CPU test, which is run at 640*480 and uses the dm-inferno map, which is one of the most power hungry maps included.   The Video tests were run with a slightly modification to the program, instead of all the maps, we only tested dm-antalus, which apart from dm-inferno, is a very power hungry level.  This test was run at both 1024*768 and 1600*1200 with the high settings.  So lets see how the Chaintech board and the IGP did.

   We can see that in the CPU test the nForce 2 doesn't show any advantage at all compared to the SiS 745 chipset.  Apart from the single channel mode IGP the systems all have extremely similar graphs, with only a few small differences between the different cards/platforms.  The differences between the different systems is small to non-existent differences between the SiS 745 and the nForce 2, in either single or dual channel mode.  In UT2003 the difference between with IGP enabled and it disabled is pretty high, about 25% in dual channel mode, though this may be more a video card difference than that of the lowered bandwidth to the CPU.  However the differences between single channel mode and dual channel mode are very high, about 40.4%, which is nice to see.  How about when we increase the resolution to 1024*768?

    Here we see the limitations of the GeForce 4MX series start to creep in.  Even the higher clocked MX 440, which has a 75MHz core speed difference and a 90MHz (180DDR) memory speed difference, is only 19% faster than the dual channel IGP.  One may be able to play at 1024*768 with the integrated video card, as long as you lower the quality settings to normal or slightly lower levels.  When we look at the graph of the IGP modes we see only three upward spikes in either mode and no real downward spikes.  With the Parhelia there was very little difference between both chipsets, though in single channel mode the Parhelia tended to have more in the way of spikes.  Does the performance situation change when we up the resolution to 1600*1200? 

   Here we see all three modes that we tested the Parhelia in are the same, which is good as this turns into a video test.  The only noticeable difference in graphs between the GF4 cards is that the MX card has slightly higher peaks than that of the IGP.  However it would be reasonable to say that anything from the GeForce 4MX card down is definitely not 'playable' at this resolution.  The difference between the MX and the dual channel IGP isn't all that much, about 20%, and the difference between dual and single channel mode is a rather large 55%.  But Unreal Tournament 2003 is only one of the newer games, can the nForce 2 and IGP perform better in a slightly older game?

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