SiSoftware Sandra 2003

Although a synthetic benchmark, it's a popular one, freely available if you wish to make comparison benchmarks. We will be testing the CPU, MMX, and memory speeds.

CPU Arithmetic Benchmark

CPU Multimedia Benchmark

Memory Benchmark

As we've been able to observe through our last few nForce 2 reviews, there is little difference between all the boards when it comes to performance. Keep in mind that during testing, we're using an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, and not the IGP. When using the IGP, it will cut into the total memory, so how is memory performance when using the IGP?

	With 9700 Pro	With nForce2 IGP
NF7-M Ram Int. Buff. @ 166	2391	2274

Using 64MB of system ram, overall memory performance is deminished somewhat. If you're looking for maximum memory performance, you're best to use a dedicated video card, but even when using the IGP, performance is not bad at all.

PC Mark 2002

Pretty close across the board, but the NF7-M holds a slight lead at both bus speeds.

PiFast

A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is version 4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory.

Lower is Better

This is a real-world benchmark, and will stress the memory subsystem. The NF7-M easily beats the MSI board in this test, shaving about 2 seconds off the computing time.

3D Mark 2001SE, 1024x768 - Default

3D Mark is one of those benchmark apps that will eat up as much processing power as it can. Benchmarks were run at default 1024x768, as I felt 640x480 is getting to be fairly pointless.

No real difference. Any nForce 2 board will do, but if you want to nitpick, the NF7-M does improve upon the MSI.

Unreal Tournament 2003

UT2K3 s a real system killer, and can bring many systems to its knees. We used the scripts written by , which are excellent tools in testing various resolutions and detail levels. We selected the CPU test, which uses the dm-inferno map.

Dead even this time around. Neither board will let you down if gaming is your thing.

Quake 3 Arena, 640x480 - Fastest

It's getting old, I know, but Quake 3 is still a decent benchmark for almost anything. For motherboards and CPUs, we run at the lowest settings and fire away.

It's not a large difference, but the NF7-M ends up pulling out a win here.

Jedi Knight 2, 640x480 - Fastest

Another dead heat. Overall, the NF7-M has proven to be slightly faster than the K7N2G-ILSR, but not by much.