Gigabyte K8NSC
AMD Athlon 64 socket 939NForce 3 250Gb
AGP / PCI
The second heaviest system benchmarks we use, Lock On, gave results of minimum 15 fps and an average 53.85 fps. Like in Splinter Cell, we see a slight variation between platforms of different chipsets. The K8NSC edges a bit ahead, but again nothing really noticeable during gameplay.
Even on F1 Challenge which is very bandwidth sensitive, there's not much difference between the two. A minimum 55 fps and an average 81.34 fps is very acceptable, proving both system offers fluid gameplay with this game.
Nascar 2003 Season benchmark give us a minimum of 41 fps and an average of 58.77 fps. Lower, but not very significant and hardly noticeable during gameplay (3 fps from around a 60 fps average). That's because the difference is on the higher fps, you could see there's a 7 fps difference between the two system's maximum fps.
Full Spectrum Warrior gives us a minimum 37 fps and an average 50.35. Again we see the lack of any significant fps differences between chipsets and motherboards with the Athlon 64 system.
Finally, the heaviest system benchmark, Rome Total War, gives us around 16 to 17 minimum fps and an average 21.14 fps. Same thing here, although the fps is lower for all systems. 1 or 2 fps at most, but that's expected with this benchmark.
Conclusion:
If you want an AGP Athlon 64 platform that is as fast as PCI Express, but you still want to use AGP graphics cards and don't want to pay for a pricey board, Gigabyte K8NSC is it. You can expect the same performance and the stability you expect from Gigabyte with the K8NSC. The lack of features is understandable, but the most important ones are there: Gigabit LAN and sound. As an extra, the K8NSC lets you use IDE hard drives in a RAID array configuration, so you can use it to max out the performance of your hard drives.[Previous Page]
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