One of the best ways to measure the performance of a PC is through 3D games, since they usually pull the maximum power from the motherboard, memory, CPU, video card and hard disk drive. We chose five programs for measuring the 3D performance of the motherboard being reviewed: 3DMark2001 SE, 3DMark03, 3DMark05, Doom 3 and Quake III Arena. The motherboards with SLI feature were tested twice, one with SLI enabled and another without SLI configuration.

3DMark2001 SE simulates DirectX 8.1 games. We used this program to see how the motherboard being reviewed acts running games from this generation. You can find the results below.

Motherboard	3DMark2001 SE (Build 3.3.0)	%
MSI K8N Diamond Plus (nForce4 SLI X16) SLI	19688	+2.09
Albatron K8SLI (nForce4 SLI) Normal	19637	+1.93
Foxconn WinFast NF4UK8AA-8EKRS (nForce4 Ultra)	19580	+1.64
ECS KN1 SLI Extreme (nForce4 SLI) Normal	19506	+1.25
ULi AP970A (ULi M1697)	19328	+0.33
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe (nForce4 SLI) Normal	19314	+0.25
ECS KN1 Extreme (nForce4 Ultra)	19302	+0.19
DFI LANParty UT nF4 SLI-D (nForce4 SLI) Normal	19284	+0.10
MSI K8N Diamond Plus (nForce4 SLI X16) Normal	19265
ULi AP9567A (ULi M1695)	19115	-0.78
Sapphire PI-A9RX480 (ATI Xpress 200P)	19054	-1.11
ULi AP9567A (ULi M1695) - AGP	18988	-1.46

All motherboards achieved a similar performance without using SLI configuration.

We included K8N Diamond Plus results with SLI for you to compare the performance difference you may expect when enabling SLI on this motherboard. As you can see, the performance increased just a little bit on 3DMark 2001 SE when we activated SLI. This result was expected, since older games aren’t optimized to use SLI.

Comparing the results among SLI-enabled motherboards (see table below), MSI K8N Diamond Plus achieved the worst performance among the motherboards we tested. This occurred probably because we used a newer video driver that isn’t optimized for 3DMark2001 SE, which is an old benchmarking software.

Motherboard	3DMark2001 SE (Build 3.3.0)	%
DFI LANParty UT nF4 SLI-D (nForce4 SLI)	20853	+6.03
ECS KN1 SLI Extreme (nForce4 SLI)	20573	+4.60
Albatron K8SLI (nForce4 SLI)	20545	+4.46
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe (nForce4 SLI)	20004	+1.71
MSI K8N Diamond Plus (nForce4 SLI X16)	19668