ECS C19-A SLI Motherboard Review

3D Performance: Quake III

Even though this is an old game its importance comes from the fact its engine is used by several other games, like Jedi Knight II and Medal of Honor, and also because this game is very sensitive to any changes on the hardware configuration. So we used this game to check how the reviewed motherboard acted running old but popular games.

We used the demo four available on version 1.32 of Quake III to make our benchmarking with this game. We ran this demo three times at 1024x768x32 resolution and all image quality settings on their default configuration and we picked the middle value for our comparisons, i.e., we discarded the highest and the lowest values.

Check the results below.

Under normal mode on Quake III ECS C19-A SLI was beaten only by MSI P4N Diamond SLI (nForce4 SLI) Normal/DDR2, being faster than PCChips Tidalwave T18 (Intel i915P) PCI-E/DDR2/DDR, DFI LanParty 875P-T (Intel i875P) AGP/DDR, Albatron PX915P Pro (Intel i915P) PCI-E/DDR, EPoX 5EPA+ (Intel i915P) PCI-E/DDR, ECS 915P-A (Intel i915P) PCI-E/DDR, ECS 865PE-A7 (Intel i865PE) AGP/DDR, ECS 915P-A (Intel i915P) AGP-Express/DDR2 and PCChips Tidalwave T18 (Intel i915P) AGP-Pro/DDR2.

We included ECS C19-A SLI results with SLI mode enabled for you to compare the performance difference you may expect when enabling SLI on this motherboard. When we enabled SLI the 3D performance dropped 9.17%. This result was expected, since older games aren’t optimized to use SLI and in several cases the performance, instead of increasing, decrease, as we experienced.

Comparing the results among SLI-enabled motherboards (see table below),  MSI P4N Diamond SLI (nForce4 SLI) SLI/DDR2 was 4.69% faster than ECS C19-A SLI, but the reviewed motherboard from ECS was 7.19% faster than EPoX 5NVA+ SLI (nForce4 SLI) SLI/DDR2.

But keep in mind that on Quake III SLI decreases the system performance instead of increasing it (see previous table).