| DFI Lanparty UT nF4 Ultra-D Motherboard - Page 6 of 7 |
Benchmarking (continued):
I also wanted to see what kind of hard drive performance to expect with the onboard SATA RAID. I tested both the Dual Seagate 200 Gig NCQ drives in RAID 0 and the Western Digital Raptor as a single drive using HDTach. I was impressed with the performance of the RAID array, but expected more from the Raptor.
Graphics and Gaming:
This board is all Lanparty, therefore you would expect it to perform well when it comes to gaming. When teamed up with a fast modern video card, it shows that it will indeed impress, however toss in two of those cards and look out. All of the tests that follow were conducted on both the Ultra-D and the SLI-DR board with the NVidia driver version 71.84. None of the video cards were overclocked for these tests. The SLI-DR tests were run with two NVidia 6600GT cards in full SLI mode.
3DMark was also created by Futuremark to test graphics subsystems using real life gaming style features. Over the years Futuremark has created harder and harder, more demanding benchmark programs. The first test we ran was 3DMark 2001SE. While not nearly as demanding as the benchmarks to come, it is still a standard people look to.
While we see a slight increase when running in SLI mode it is obvious there is no real significant jump. SLI requires both the driver and the program to support SLI, and 3Dmark2001SE does not support SLI.
Next in the lineage is 3Dmark2003. This program is much more demanding and taps much more of the features a modern video card is capable of. As you can see, we begin to see a very healthy jump from one card to dual card SLI. Looks like SLI support begins in 3Dmark2003.
Recently Futuremark released the toughest 3Dmark yet, 3DMark2005. This version uses all the latest technology to bash all but the best cards into submission. At some points during the testing you can expect to get into the low single digit frame rates. Here we can see nearly double the performance offered by running SLI on the Lanparty nF4 SLI-DR.
How does all this stack up in real life? With the kind of numbers these systems turned out in the 3DMark tests above I would expect some pretty incredible frame rates from any modern day games. Let’s go older games to newer games and see what kind of results we get. First is one of my extremely worn out games, Unreal Tournament 2003. All UT2003 testing was done at 1024x768 resolution. Here we see that overclocking the memory and processor had much more of an effect on frame rates than adding a second video card. Even to the point of lowering frame rates slightly, this could be due to the effect of a touch higher processor usage under SLI conditions.
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