ECS GF9300T-A Black Series Motherboard Review

Unreal Tournament 3

Unreal Tournament 3 is the latest installment from this famous first person shooter franchise, supporting DirectX 10 graphics when installed on Windows Vista with a DX10 compatible card (which was our case). We upgraded Unreal Tournament 3 to version 1.2 and benchmarked it with the help of HOC UT3 benchmarking utility using the “Containment” demo, disabling anisotropic filtering and running the game at 1024×768. We also included the result achieved by a 64-bit Sapphire HD 3450 card installed in the motherboard PCI Express x16 slot while disabling the motherboard’s on-board video, so we can have an idea of the performance of a very low-end video card compared to the on-board video of the reviewed motherboard. The results are below, in frames per second (FPS).

GeForce 9300 achieved the same performance of a Radeon HD 3450 on Unreal Tournament 3, which is an outstanding feat for an on-board video solution. Its performance was 170% higher than Intel DG45ID (Intel G45) and 575% higher than ECS GF7100PVT-M3 (GeForce 7100). Intel G31 and G33 weren’t able to run this game.

Even though GeForce 7100 and Intel G45 were able to run this game, the performance achieved by these chipsets was so low that we can’t consider that they can run it, since you won’t be able to play the game at such low number of frames per second.