Test Setup

ASUS A8N-SLI: Athlon 64 3500+, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC3200, ASUS AX800 XT, 160GB Seagate 7200.7, Windows XP SP1, ATI Catalyst 5.3, nForce Unified 6.39.

Soltek SL-K890Pro-939: Athlon 64 3500+, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC3200, ASUS AX800 XT, 160GB Seagate 7200.7, Windows XP SP1, ATI Catalyst 5.3, VIA Hyperion 4.55.

MSI K8N Neo2: Athlon 64 3500+, 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC3200, ATI Radeon X800 XT, 160GB Seagate 7200.7, Windows XP SP1, ATI Catalyst 5.3, nForce Unified 5.10.

Going up against the ASUS A8N-SLI Premium will be the Soltek SL-K890Pro-939 K8T890 board, and the K8N Neo2 nForce 3 Ultra. The setups all share the same peripheral components, except the A8N-SLI and the SL-K890Pro-939 will be using an ASUS PCI Express X800 XT, while the nForce 3 will be using an AGP X800 XT. Onboard audio was enabled in the BIOS for all the boards, but not used during game testing. We did do some benchmarks using two 6800GTs, but given the test suite below, there was no impact on the final numbers.

Test Software is as follows:

SiSoft Sandra 2005 - Our standard synthetic benchmark suite, updated to version 2005. While it doesn't provide real-world information, it does give us a base for the rest of the tests.

Business Winstone and Multimedia 2004 -A scripted benchmark using real-world applications. Higher numbers are better.

SYSMark 2004 Office and Content Creation - Another scripted benchmark using real-world applications. Like the previous tests, higher numbers are better.

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.

TMPGEnc 2.521 - We used an Animatrix file, titled , and a WAV created from VirtualDub. The movie was then converted it into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file with a bitrate of 5000. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

CDex Audio Conversion Wav to MP3 - CDex was used to convert a 414MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

Doom 3, Far Cry, Unreal Tournament 2003 & 2004 @ 640x480, LQ Settings - While higher resolutions tax the video card, lower resolutions rely on CPU and subsystem speed. These results are real-world, and higher scores are better. was used to collect numbers from Far Cry and UT2004.

All benchmarks will be run a total of three times with the average scores being displayed. Any system tweaks and ram timings were configured to the best possible for each platform.

SiSoft Sandra 2005 CPU

SiSoft Sandra 2005 MMX

SiSoft Sandra 2005 Memory

Given that AMD integrated the memory controller on the CPU die, there are minimal differences in the memory benchmarks. For the CPU tests, the ASUS A8N-SLI Premium places at the top of the pack, but we're talking mere percentage points here.

Business Winstone and Multimedia 2004

The A8N-SLI places second in the Business benchmark, and barely finishes on top in the Content Creation tests.

SYSMark 2004 Office and Content Creation

Same trends with the Sysmark benchmarks, with the A8N-SLI placing first in the Content Creation tests, but second in the Office benchmark.

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