Unreal Tournament 2003	Source: Epic

Unreal Tournament 2003 is the sequel to 1999's multiple 'Game of the Year' award winner. It uses the very latest Unreal Engine technology - where graphics, sound and game play are taken beyond the bleeding edge. Unreal Tournament 2003 employs the use of Vertex as well as Pixel Shaders and it's recommended that you use a DirectX 8 videocard to get the most out of the game.

UT2003 Demo 640x480 Flyby
	Video Card	FPS	Ranking
1.	A64 3200+/MSI K8T Neo (200/400)	299.5
2.	A64 3200+/Albatron K8T800 (200/400)	300.96
3.	A64 3200+/Epox 8HDA3+ (200/400)	286.38
4.	A64 3200+/Gigabyte K8NNXP (200/400)	295.74
5.	A64 3200+/Gigabyte K8NNXP (227/377)	319.54

UT2003 Demo 640x460 Botmatch
	Video Card	FPS	Ranking
1.	A64 3200+/MSI K8T Neo (200/400)	94.07
2.	A64 3200+/Albatron K8T800 (200/400)	94.87
3.	A64 3200+/Epox 8HDA3+ (200/400)	90.21
4.	A64 3200+/Gigabyte K8NNXP (200/400)	93.53
5.	A64 3200+/Gigabyte K8NNXP (227/377)	103.14

While the K8NNXP is slower than the K8T800 boards, but I doubt you'd notice it at these speeds. ;-)

With the nForce3 150, it seems as if nVIDIA still has a bit of catching up to do. HyperTransport doesn't quite run at full spec, but that didn't really seem to affect the 2D based office benchmarks. This suggests that the Gigabyte K8NNXP could be just as fast as an equivalently configured K8T800 motherboard... but not quite. In the 3D world the shortcomings of nvidia's nForce 3 150 chipset put it squarely behind the other K8T800-based motherboards, even if only by a few percent.

The Gigabyte K8NNXP is a very well rounded motherboard with a boat load of features such as Serial ATA/Serial ATA RAID, IDE RAID, IEEE 1394, hot pluggable IEEE 1394B, 5.1 audio, dual ethernet (one Gigabit, one 10/100) and of course dual BIOS's. If you feel the need to upgrade there are five PCI slots an 8x AGP port. The layout of the board is excellent, it really seems as if Gigabyte was thinking about the end user when they designed the K8NNXP.

More and more people out there are starting to build their own PC's and Gigabyte tries to make that job easier. It's the little things they do that are greatly appreciated; things like colour coordinating headers and the front panel I/O, or even just labelling the motherboard clearly all help in the end.

Performance of the board was quite good compared to the other K8 motherboards we tested it against. While the K8NNXP did come in last in many of the 3D benchmarks, the difference was only a few percent on average. The Gigabyte K8NNXP is a fast motherboard, and I'm sure it would make an excellent basis for an AMD Athlon64 workstation. With such a comprehensive list of features already included, the list of items you'll need to complete a full PC just got seriously shorter - and that's always a good situation!

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