MSI K8N Diamond Plus Motherboard Review

3D Performance: Doom 3

Doom 3 is one of the heaviest games available today. We run this game at 1024x768x32 resolution at high quality. We run demo1 four times and wrote the obtained number of frames per second. The first result we discarded at once, since it is far inferior than the other results. This happens because at the first time we run the demo the game must load all textures to video memory, fact that doesn’t happen from the second time we run the demo on. From the three results left, we consider as our official result the middle result, i.e., we discard the highest and the lowest values. Curiously almost all times the values obtained at the second round on were the same.

A very important detail that we must mention is that Doom 3 has an internal FPS lock: it is only capable of generating 60 frames per second, even if your PC is able to produce more frames per second than that. This is done in order to make the game to have the same “playability” sensation independently from the video card installed on the PC. This lock, however, is disabled in the game benchmarking mode.

For further details on how to measure 3D performance with Doom 3, read our tutorial on this subject.

On this test MSI K8N Diamond Plus achieved a performance similar to the majority of motherboards we tested, being faster than all motherboards based on ULi chipset.

We included K8N Diamond Plus results with SLI for you to compare the performance difference you may expect when enabling SLI on this motherboard. Enabling SLI we had a 21.80% performance increase on this test.

Comparing the results among SLI-enabled motherboards (see table below), MSI K8N Diamond Plus achieved a performance similar to other motherboards we tested.