One of the best ways to measure the performance of a PC is thru 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

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.

Motherboards	3DMark2001 SE (Build 3.3.0)	%
ECS C19-A SLI (nForce4 SLI XE) SLI/DDR2	18771	+1.93
ECS C19-A SLI (nForce4 SLI XE) Normal/DDR2	18416
EPoX 5NVA+ SLI (nForce4 SLI) Normal/DDR2	18400	-0.09
Foxconn 915A01-P-8EKRS2 (Intel i915P) PCI-E/DDR2	18327	-0.49
ECS 915P-A (Intel i915P) PCI-E/DDR2	18186	-1.26
PCChips Tidalwave T18 (Intel i915P) PCI-E/DDR2	18057	-1.99
EPoX 5EPA+ (Intel i915P) PCI-E/DDR	18028	-2.15
ECS 915P-A (Intel i915P) PCI-E/DDR	17949	-2.60
DFI LanParty 875P-T (Intel i875P) AGP/DDR	17948	-2.61
PCChips Tidalwave T18 (Intel i915P) PCI-E/DDR	17941	-2.65
DFI LanParty 925X-T2 (Intel i925X) PCI-E/DDR2	17915	-2.80
DFI LanParty UT 915P-T12 (Intel i915P) DDR2	17818	-3.36
Albatron PX915P Pro (Intel i915P) PCI-E/DDR	17729	-3.88
ECS 865PE-A7 (Intel i865PE) AGP/DDR	17620	-4.52
DFI LanParty UT 915P-T12 (Intel i915P) PCI-E/DDR	17407	-5.80
ECS 915P-A (Intel i915P) AGP-Express/DDR2	14005	-31.50
PCChips Tidalwave T18 (Intel i915P) AGP-Pro/DDR2	13857	-32.90

Under normal mode ECS C19-A SLI achieved a performance similar to the majority of motherboards included in our tests, being faster than DFI LanParty UT 915P-T12 (Intel i915P) DDR2/DDR, Albatron PX915P Pro (Intel i915P) PCI-E/DDR, ECS 865PE-A7 (Intel i865PE) AGP/DDR, ECS 915P-A (Intel i915P) AGP-Express/DDR2 and PCChips Tidalwave T18 (Intel i915P) AGP-Pro/DDR2.

We included ECS C19-A SLI 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 measured by 3DMark2001 SE increased only 1.93% when we enabled SLI and we cannot consider this performance increase considerable. This result was expected, since older games aren’t optimized to use SLI.

Comparing the results among SLI-enabled motherboards (see table below), ECS C19-A SLI achieved a performance similar to other motherboards we tested.

Motherboards	3DMark2001 SE (Build 3.3.0)	%
MSI P4N Diamond SLI (nForce4 SLI) SLI/DDR2	19070	+1.59
EPoX 5NVA+ SLI (nForce4 SLI) SLI/DDR2	18893	+0.65
ECS C19-A SLI (nForce4 SLI XE) SLI/DDR2	18771