This is the second review (After Doc's Soyo CK8 review found here ) to use our new test suite and test system for the Athlon 64 platform. I think a few words need to be said here about our new test system. For the longest time Motherboards.org has used Nvidia based video cards in our test stations. We've found their drivers to be stable, their cards to have the least problems, and they were frankly the most popular video card company among enthusiasts. Things have changed with the release of the ATI Radeon 9700 Pro and it's successors the 9800 Pro and 9800 XT and ATI's driver support is far better than a couple of years ago. It's only fitting then, that we've decided to use the 9700 Pro as our primary test video card.
Our new software test suite introduces PCMark04 into our test software. This is Futuremark's latest version of their system test giving such useful numbers as hdd, memory and basic video card performance as part of its overall score. The second addition to our test suite is 3dmark03 Build 340. With the recent controversy of Nvidia and their cheating in 3dmark03 Futuremark has made a conscious effort to make sure all cards are performing on a level playing field. Also updated is SpecviewPerf to the latest 7.1.1 standard.
The following Unreal 2003 test are NOT used to calculate our performance score but are included here as additional scores for you to compare.
