3D Rendering & Video Tests
Over the past few years the increased power that CPU's have brought to the table has allowed more people to begin playing with creating their own 3D models. This has allowed people who previously wouldn't have been able to create a 3D animation video, to do a pretty good looking job of it. We will look at one of the programs designed for those just starting out, Caligari's Truespace 4.2. As with our "Battle at 650MHz" article we will render a picture with approximately 80,00 polygons on the screen at once as well as other feature mentioned in our test system setup. The final result looks something like this:
Here we see that when we do not use the IGP of the nForce 2 we get the best results. The IGP does lower performance by about 3% which is hardly noticeable in most any situation. The difference between the SiS 745 system and the nForce 2 is about 2.6% in single channel mode, and about 3.3% in dual channel mode. There is not allot of differences between the systems, with only 3.6% differences between the slowest and the highest performing system. How about when we encode video does the size of the video (~2GB) and the size of each frame (~360KB) help the nForce 2 improve over the SiS 745 chipset in terms of speed?
Here the difference between the single channel mode, and the dual channel mode, with the IGP enabled, is about 3.6% which is more than we saw with the Truespace test. When we move away from the onboard graphics card, we see an improvement of 4.2% in single channel mode, and only 2.7% better with dual channel enabled. This is most likely because there is more than enough bandwidth in dual channel mode for basic 2D graphics and to satisfy the 2.1GB/s bandwidth the Athlon needs, and in single channel mode the video card takes some of the Athlon's 2.1GB/s bandwidth for the integrated video. What though about the nForce 2 as a chipset compared to the SiS 745? The difference is between 12.8% compared to single channel mode with the IGP enabled, to about a 20.1% increase with dual channel mode enabled. Lastly lets look at how the nVidia NIC compares to that of a DLink 538TX 10/100 network card, and that of a Firewire network card.
Firewire Download
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Firewire Upload
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DLink 10/100 Download
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DLink 10/100 Upload
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nVidia 10/100 Download
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nVidia 10/100 Upload
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We see from the results that the nVidia network card are at least as good, if not some what better than that of the DLink card for both upload and download results. However when compared to the Firewire card and its 400Mb/s network bandwidth both cards the nVidia card isn't nearly as fast as the firewire network.
Next Page - Conclusion
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Chaintech 7NIF2 nForce 2: We take a look at Chaintech's latest nForce 2 implementation, the 7NIF2. The board not only features the nVidia IGP, but it's also based on the Micro-ATX form factor.
