ECS KN1 SLI Extreme 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.

On Quake III under normal mode ECS KN1 SLI Extreme was beaten by DFI LANParty UT nF4 SLI-D (nForce4 SLI) and by MSI K8N Diamond Plus (nForce4 SLI X16), this one using a newer video driver and because of this achieved a better performance than other motherboards. ECS KN1 SLI Extreme achieved a performance similar to the other motherboards we reviewed, being a little bit faster than KN1 Extreme (nForce4 Ultra).

On MSI K8N Diamond Plus we had to use a newer driver because nForce4 SLI X16 chipset only works with newer video drivers. The ideal scenario would be benchmarking all the motherboards with the same newer video driver, but several of the motherboards included on our tests weren’t available anymore.

Under SLI mode, excluding MSI K8N Diamond Plus that was using a newer video driver, ECS KN1 SLI Extreme was beaten only by DFI LANParty UT nF4 SLI-D (nForce4 SLI).

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