Socket 939 Roundup: Battle at the Top
by Wesley Fink on July 30, 2004 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
DirectX 8 & OpenGL Gaming Performance
DX8 and OpenGL games show the same consistent performance between the VIA and nVidia 939 chipsets except for X2 and RCW-ET. X2, a Direct X 8.1 game with demanding T&L (transform and lighting effects), performs best on a VIA chipset, while Wolfenstein-Enemy Territory, an OpenGL game, is best on nForce3. We do plan to take a closer look at Halo, X2, and RCW-ET performance when we can repeat the tests with an ATI X800 XT video card.
Generally, the domination of the Socket 939 results compared to Intel's top Pentium 4 560 (3.6GHz) on the top 925X chipset is not a pretty picture for Intel, in DX9, DX8, or OpenGL. Clearly, the Athlon 64 processors in general, and the Socket 939 in particular, continue their domination of Gaming benchmarks.
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RyanVM - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
Also, networking benches would have been nice (throughput and CPU utilization). It would be interesting to see what kind of impact Gigabyte going with a 3rd party ethernet controller has in comparison to the MSI board using the NF3's controller.On a somewhat related note, when will the Neo2 actually be available for purchase?
Marlin1975 - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
How about telling board makers to use better Sound for their boards.I got my board as it came with a VIA Envy soundcard. When I see RealTek sound that tells me they don;t care about quality, but about what they can say comes with the board.
Even C-Media has a new full (non-ac97) soundchip out now that can;t be that much more then a realtek 850/650/655 chip.
Wesley Fink - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
#7,8,9 - Corrected. Since ECS did use a SiS chip on their VIA board for secondary RAID, I got confused and spread the chipsets around :-)Stefpet - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
...but when will we see K8T890 or nforce4 motherboards?I don't want to be forced to replace the motherboard with a new one to get that top performing PCI Express card later...
Crassus - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
Final words, somewhere in the middle of the page:"The ECS is a remarkable step forward for ECS"
:c)
Great work, though.
RyanVM - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
Silly me, I meant ECS, not Epox.RyanVM - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
"8 USB 2.0 ports supported by nF3-250" for the K8T800PRO-based Epox KV2?Wesley Fink - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
#4 - Corrected. With more than 9000 words a number typo seems inevitable.BLHealthy4life - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
Still can't find the MSI K8n Neo2 mobo for sale anywhere.Been waiting and waiting....and waiting some more...
AkumaX - Tuesday, July 20, 2004 - link
Our FX53 topped out at about 2.59 GHz on the ECS KV2, which is slightly below the 3.6+ achieved on the top 939 boards