Review: Leadtek Twinforce 2

LAME is up first. An encoding of a large patch of .WAV files extracted from a CD into 320kbps format MP3 using LAME 3.91 MMX (3.92 is available but not used here). We are CPU limited here and the test barely scratches the other areas on test here.

Pifast is a little different. Calculating 10 million places of Pi using the Chudnovsky method is a good test of chipset to memory latencies, memory speeds and latencies and overall CPU power. The Twinforce 2 motherboard and the XP2100+ should do well here.

Beating the P4 into 3rd place, the FPU power of the XP2100+ and the low latency memory controller provided by the motherboard chipset do all the hard work here.

Finally we have SETI. Overall system memory bandwidth (cpu and main memory) and a very strong FPU are they keys to good performance here. We've seen what a liberated Athlon platform can do with our recent XP2700+ review on nForce 2, how can the Twinforce 2 and XP2100+ do?

In the overall scheme of things the nForce chipset does its level best to keep the gap as small as it is and it's a very valiant effort. Fast AthlonXP's eat up this SETI benchmark and being the slowest setup on test, we couldn't have expected it to make a huge dent in proceedings. Rather the result is very admirable for what you get hardware wise in the Leadtek bundle.