Test Setup

Albatron KX600S Pro: Athlon 2500+ (11x166), 2 x 512MB Kingston HyperX PC4000 (2.5-3-3-6), AIW Radeon 9800 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, VIA Hyperion 4in1 drivers 4.51, ATI Catalyst 4.1.

ABIT NF7-S 2.0: Athlon 2500+ (11x166), 2 x 512MB Kingston HyperX PC4000 (2.5-3-3-6), AIW Radeon 9800 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, nVidia Unified Driver 3.3, ATI Catalyst 4.1.

SiSoft Sandra 2004

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, using the 32-bit 2004 version.

CPU Arithmetic Benchmark

Though the KT600 isn't quite the nForce 2 killer, it appears that the performance is not too shabby. The performance difference is between 1% to 2%, which is just within our margin or error.

CPU Multimedia Benchmark

For the MMX tests, we have a much different story. The nForce 2 Ultra totally dominates here by over 60%.

Memory Benchmark

Despite the Dual Channel (DC) architecture, the Single Channel (SC) KT600 takes the lead in our memory benchmarks. I was quite surprised for a couple reasons, as DC typically outperforms SC platforms for this test, and the large gap in performance in the MMX tests. Nonetheless, score one here for the KX600 Pro.

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. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

Lower is better

Moving on to our real-world tests, we see the nForce 2 fighting back and out pacing the KT600 by 0.15 seconds. It was a close call, but repeated tests did not change the end result.