Unreal Tournament 2003: Antalus, Min Detail @ 640

	Frames per Second
MSI K8N Neo	407.27
ABIT KV8-MAX3	397.43

The K8N Neo continues its strong showing today, besting the KV8-MAX3 by a little less than 10fps in UT2003.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Checkpoint, Min Detail @ 640

	Frames per Second
MSI K8N Neo	218.6
ABIT KV8-MAX3	220.3

Quake 3: Arena, Min Detail @ 640

	Frames per Second
MSI K8N Neo	497.7
ABIT KV8-MAX3	506.3

With the exception of UT2003, the K8N Neo fell behind in both Quake 3 engine games. We're at a loss to explain this, though judging from some other reviews I've read, the K8T800 seems to be a little quicker in the gaming department.

Subsystem Testing - Audio

For our UT2003 audio/framerate tests, we ran dm-Antalus benchmarks at 640x480, minimum detail with sound on and off. This was repeated at 1024x768, but with maximum detail. The reasoning is at low detail and resolution, the work will fall on the CPU and motherboard subsystem. Higher resolution is more representative of actual gameplay for most users

Unreal Tournament 2003: Antalus, Min Detail @ 640

	Frames per Second
Sound Off	407.27
Sound On	402.12

With sound enabled, the MSI K8N Neo takes a 5 frames per second hit at 640x480.

Unreal Tournament 2003: Antalus, Max Detail @ 1024

	Frames per Second
Sound Off	368.32
Sound On	367.11

At a higher resolution and detail levels, the onboard sound's CPU utilization will not be a factor at all. There is less than 1fps loss in speed when using the onboard sound at this resolution, therefore, I wouldn't hesitate in using the onboard sound for general use and gaming.

In terms of sound quality, I found gaming to be very acceptable, as was the case with movie and MP3 playback. Even when doing some disk intensive tasks, MP3 playback was not affected.

For recording tests, I used a small microphone that came with my Audigy Platinum, and recorded a few sentences. I must say that I did not find the quality to be very good. The pitch jumped all over the place, and in some cases, the sound dropped off all together.

Hard Drive Performance

We used HD Tach to gauge read and write performance with our Western Digital SE 120GB HDD, and Maxtor 120GB SATA drives. Both disks were freshly imaged, and configured with only one partition.

Read Speeds

	Min kps	Ave kps	Max kps
PATA Performance	28832.4	52434.2	63204.0
SATA Performance	19640.0	44405.3	57036.0

Write Speeds

	Min kps	Ave kps	Max kps
PATA Performance	17145.0	28435.6	63196.2
SATA Performance	17033.1	27767.8	59142.2

SAPerhaps the SATA drivers were not as refined as the standard IDE, but the Western Digital held a slight lead over the Maxtor here in terms of performance. CPU utilization was also lower, with the PATA averaging 8.9% and the SATA 9.1%.

Network Performance

We used to test the networking speed, and Windows Task Manager for CPU usage. We copied a variety of install files, totalling 758 MB, varying in sizes of 300kb to as much as 60MB per file to and from the MSI K8N Neo Platinum machine, to our ABIT IC7-MAX3 box, which uses an Intel Gigabit CSA controller. We also performed the same test with an ISO image, totalling 761MB.

Both systems were connected via a CAT-5E crossover cable, which should prevent any bottlenecks that would arise with our standard 10/100 router.

Small Files Test - 758MB Total

	Time to Copy	Ave Transfer mB/sec	CPU %
Upload	0:21.2	35.87	12
Download	0:27.6	27.73	17

Compared with some past results, the nF3-250's Gigabit NIC and MSI's Marvell PHY do very well in our small file transfer tests. What is amazing isn't the copy speed, but rather the CPU usage. We peaked at about 22% during the download tests, and 15% during upload, but the controller sustained 17% and 12% respectively through the majority of the tests, even dipping as low as 14% and 9% for the downloads and uploads.

Large File Test - 761MB Total

	Time to Copy	Ave Transfer mB/sec	CPU %
Upload	0:20.8	38.12	10
Download	0:24.5	32.56	15

With the large file, our results were similar to the small files, but slightly improved. Again we see excellent CPU usage throughout testing, even better than we've seen with Intel's CSA.

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