You may be asking why we are using Quake III, an old game, to evaluate motherboard performance. When we have a high-end video card installed, like was our case, newer 3D benchmarking software measures only the video card performance, and other components – the motherboard, in particular – don’t affect much the measurement taken by these programs. Since we were willing to measure the performance impact the motherboard would have on the system, such programs wouldn’t fit our needs.

Quake III, on the other hand, is very sensitive to any changes on the hardware configuration. So we decided to use this program instead of newer ones.

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.

Here MSI K9N Diamond was faster than the other motherboards included in our comparison: it was 7.11% faster than ASUS M2N32 SLI De Luxe, 9.98% faster than Gigabyte GA-M59SLI-S5 and 11.54% faster than ECS KA3 MVP. “LinkBoost Technology” we will talk about on next page may have caused this difference.