 Unreal Tournament
2004 |
Source:
Epic |
|
Unreal
Tournament 2004 uses the very latest Unreal Engine technology. Unreal Tournament
2004 employs the use of Vertex and Pixel Shaders and it's recommended that you
use a DirectX 9 videocard to you plan to play competitively.
Unfortunately the other Athlon64 motherboards were not
available for UT2004 testing. The Asus K8N-Es performance looks pretty good
here, but I'm surprised overclocking does not boost framerates
by much.
Doom 3 is the most advanced OpenGL game to date, it
takes advantage of the latest videocard technology and pushes the processing power of the
CPU to its absolute limits. At its highest
setting Ultra quality, texture sizes pass the 500MB mark which means even
tomorrows videocards will have a hard time running everything. The frame rates
in the game itself are locked at 60 fps so
anything above that point is wasted. Each test is run three times and with the
third run being recorded.
Stock Doom 3 performance is good considering we're only
using a Radeon 9800XT videocard. Overclocking the Asus K8N-E Deluxe does not
result in higher framerates. We'd need to raise the CPU speed a bit for Doom 3
to notice.
Socket 754 Athlon64
Motherboards, can they face Socket 939?
2004 is a very exciting year indeed, I
can't remember a time where so much has changed so quickly. I mean just think
about how long it took for the computer industry to drop the ISA slot or
even the old AT form factor! Well, soon after the Socket 754 Athlon64 arrived,
the Socket 939 Athlon64 was released. At this point, you might as well wait for
the socket 939 Athlon64 to get PCI Express solution.
For your Socket 754 Athlon64 upgrade purposes, the Asus
K8N-E DLX is a nice motherboard that offers users a good last upgrade before
jumping onto something faster in the future. In terms of features the Asus K8N-E DLX comes with a four
port Serial ATA/RAID controller, IEEE 1394 and 8.1 channel audio. Also thrown in
for good measure is a WinDVD Software suite for those multimedia users out
there.
The performance of the Asus K8N-E DLX motherboard was
good, but then again that's expected when dealing with an Athlon64 system. It
was often ranked at the top of its class in the benchmarks, but seemed to
perform better in 3D tests. In terms of overclocking the K8N-E was a mediocre
performer - 237 MHz is not going to impress the super-geeks. With a retail
price of $175 CDN ($137 US), the Asus K8N-E DLX
motherboard is a nice board for sure.
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