System Setup and Notes
To benchmark nForce4 against competing product, I rounded up a pair of 6800 GTs on both AGP and PCI Express and assembled an AGP K8T800 Pro system using the same CPU and memory modules, at the same timings and speeds, using the same hard disk and same software installation and settings. New NVIDIA vs outgoing VIA, just the way we like it. With most of the performance on similarly equipped AMD64 systems derivative, due to the lesser influence the core logic has on performance these days with the memory controller on the CPU, it'll be interesting to see what benefits, if any, a PCI Express-based nForce4 system will have over the best selling AGP core logic.Hardware
Mainboards NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra Reference Board, CK8-04 ECS KV2 Extreme, VIA K8T800 Pro Processor AMD Athlon FX-53, 2400MHz, 1MB L2 Memory Corsair XL TwinX 1GB, 2-2-2-5 Graphics Cards NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT PEG16X, NV45 NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT AGP, NV40 Disk Western Digital Raptor 36.6GB SATA
Software
Windows XP Professional SP2
DirectX 9.0c
VIA Hyperion 4.53 Drivers
NVIDIA ForceWare Platform Driver 6.11 BETA
NVIDIA ForceWare Graphics Driver 66.81 BETA
CPU-Z 1.24.1 BETA
HEXUS Pifast
ScienceMark 2.0
LAME 3.92MMX
Kribibench v1.1
Realstorm 2004
3DMark 2001SE
3DMark03
UT2003 HEXUS Benchmark
Doom 3
Notes
NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 GT powers both systems and it's a graphics card we'll be making good use of in our platform reviews in the coming months, migrating finally from the ATI Radeon 9800 XT that's served us so well since its launch.ForceWare BETA drivers were used for both the chipset and the graphics card. NVIDIA recommend 66.81 for the best operation with nForce4 and quick examination of image quality using a couple of tools (3DMark05's IQ tool, FilterTest) show it to be a driver with output comparable to NVIDIA's last WHQL driver. That's good enough for the purposes of this article, since the driver is used on both systems and we're focused on core logic performance, rather than GPU performance.
Things you won't see tested are SLI, disk controller performance, peripheral bus performance and network controller performance. SLI is yet to launch (although the chipset does today, official release for reviews is some time off), disk controller performance is waiting on a quartet of 74GB Raptors arriving later in the week and network controller performance is currently waiting on a NetIQ Chariot testing platform to show up.
It's basic chipset level performance as far as the CPU, memory controller and graphics interface is concerned.
CPU-Z
MainboardCPU
Memory
