Review: MSI K7N2-L

Let's start with the fans favourite, 3DMark 2001SE. On an related note, 3DMark 2002 should appear very shortly due to the recent release of the official DirectX 9 runtime from Microsoft. On to the graph. Radeon 9700 Pro present and correct in all test systems.

3DMark 2001SE performance

Only 8 marks shy of 14000 3DMark's with no system or driver tweaking and you can see the XP2400+ is allowed to work well in the MSI. With an XP2700+ under the hood, expect the MSI to be within 50 marks either side of the Asus and that allows you to place it relative to the Intel systems. A strong start.

Serious Sam 2 next which should show CPU scaling pretty well.

Serious Sam 2 performance

With XP2700+, the MSI should pull alongside the Asus in terms of out of the box performance. XP2400+ with it's lower clockspeed and less bandwidth can't quite pull the same numbers but it does well.

Comanche 4 performance

More CPU scaling in effect due to the processor disparity and it's pretty evident from the graphs where XP2700+ performance would be on the MSI and conversely XP2400+ performance on the Asus. The two boards would be within a percent or two either way with the same processor.