System setup and notes
System setup
| HEXUS high-end test system | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Processor | AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 (2.8GHz, 2MiB L2 cache, AM2) | |||
| Motherboard | ASUS CROSSHAIR | ASUS M2N32-SLI Wireless Edition | abit KN9 SLI | ATI Sturgeon Reference |
| Actual CPU speed | 2812.7MHz - 200.9MHz FSB | 2812.8MHz - 200.9MHz FSB | 2813MHz - 200.9MHz FSB | 2813MHz - 200.9MHz FSB |
| Memory | 2GBytes (2 x 1GByte) Corsair EPP | |||
| Memory timings | 4-4-4-12 2T @ DDR2-800 | |||
| Graphics card(s) | NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX SLI | Radeon X1900 CrossFire | ||
| Disk drive(s) | Seagate 160GB 7200.9 SATA 3Gbps | |||
| BIOS revision | 0121 (07/24/06) | 0504 (06/14/06) | 1.12 (18/05/06) | 08.00.13 (04/05/2006) |
| Mainboard software | 9.34 | Catalyst 6.6 Southbridge package + 2.5.1540.25 (ATI AHCI SATA driver) |
||
| Graphics driver | ForceWare 91.27 | Catalyst 6.6 | ||
| Operating System | Windows XP Pro SP2 32-bit | |||
Testing software
- ScienceMark Memory Bandwidth
- ScienceMark Memory Latency
- HEXUS.pifast
- KribiBench
- HEXUS WAV encoding
- HEXUS DivX encoding
- Cinebench 2003
For 3D performance we used a trio of games:
- Far Cry v1.33
- Quake 4 v1.04
- Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05
All games were run at 1024x768. We also ran SC:CT at 1920x1200 in single and dual-GPU modes to verify that the boards could handle multi-GPU scenarios aptly.
Notes & issues
During our testing, we found the M2N32-SLI Deluxe had trouble detecting and enabling the second GeForce 7900 GTX attached to it. Over time this lead to the board completely failing to detect the second card. Once we received a replacement mainboard it worked again, but we did have further SLI issues with both boards, which you can read about on the 3D performance page of the review.
We tested the M2N32-SLI Deluxe's wireless adapter, but found it to perform 0.8-1MB/s slower than a Linksys WUSB54GS v2 when situated in the same place. Also, we found the WLAN systray application to affect performance. We had to disable it to get reliable scores in some of our benchmarks.
NTune still doesn't work on these nForce 5 boards and NVMonitor doesn't work properly yet either. ASUS's bundled AIBooster has some issues setting and getting the correct multiplier values too. When changing HT clock it would override the multiplier to 9x (the lowest you can set with AIBooster) and report incorrect CPU speeds.
On both ASUS boards, AMD Cool 'n' Quiet doesn't work. When enabled, Windows XP won't load, instead hanging at its splash screen.
The two mainboards passed over eight hours of burn-in testing each, so problems aside, they were at least stable.
