MSI K8N Diamond Plus 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 the reviewed motherboard from MSI achieved the best performance but we need to make an addendum. The version of the video driver used with K8N Diamond Plus was newer than the one used by the other motherboards. On newer benchmarking programs the driver version didn’t have any impact on the results, but on 3DMark2001 SE and on Quake III, which are older, the used driver decreased 3DMark2001 SE performance and improved Quake III results.

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.

Anyway, it was interesting to see how the newer driver lowers the performance decrease on Quake III when SLI mode is used.

Comparing the results among SLI-enabled motherboards (see table below), MSI K8N Diamond Plus achieved the best performance among all other motherboards we tested. But keep in mind that on Quake III SLI decreases the system performance instead of increasing it (see previous table).