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.

    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.

Conclusion

   So what can we conclude about this motherboard.  Does the nForce 2 chipset improve performance compared to other Athlon chipsets?  How does the integrated video compare to a standalone GeForce 4MX or a Matrox Parhelia?  How doest the integrated NIC work, is it a better performing NIC than other cards?

    Let us first consider the layout.  For a µATX motherboard, it manages to pack a fair amount of feature in a small space.  It has integrated audio, and integrated GeForce 4MX class video card with video out functions, a integrated 10/100 network card and still has room for all the standard card slots, though there is only 3 PCI slots for use.  Gladly there is a separate AGP 8X slot, so that you can use an external video card instead of the integrated video.

    Next is the BIOS, and while there are quite a few options that you can set to change the memory settings there isn't much more.  You can change almost every setting related to memory including changing the speed of the memory compared to the FSB.  There is no option to change the multiplier for those with unlocked processors, or even any options to raise the voltage of any of the onboard devices.  This makes for a disappointing overclocking result, that is limited by the processors ability to increase in speed without a voltage increase.

    The quality of the output is much like that of the MX, in the areas that I was able to test before the current motherboard died on me.  This puts the 2D quality above that of the MSI Ti4600 8X that I tested previously, and makes it pretty comfortable to use at resolutions up to 1600*1200, and should have pretty decent TV-Out quality.

    The performance of the motherboard, in comparison to another motherboard and also other video cards.  The nForce 2 only shows a noticeable improvements in performance with Jedi Knight II at 1024*768 and also when rendering video into DivX format.  With the IGP the performance was lower than that of a GeForce 4 MX in both games we tested, but was still playable using dual channel mode, using a resolution of 1024*768.  With the IGP enabled there was a noticeable difference between single channel mode and dual channel mode in games with no real difference coming from having dual channel mode enabled without the IGP being enabled.

    The price of this motherboard is only about , as seen from Pricegrabber.com.  I would like to thank Chaintech USA for providing the review sample for us to test.  I would like to note that the problem I had with my motherboard was not a motherboard problem, rather it was a silly mistake on my part.

Pros

• Dencent Speed from integrated graphics

• µATX motherboard

• Faster than other chipsets

• Good speed from NIC

• Wide range of memory settings

• 4 socket mount holes

Cons

• No major improvements due to dual channel memory mode

• No MCP-T

• Lack of Multiplier adjustments

• Lack of Voltage Control

• No Thermal Paste on chipset fan

• Sparse bundle

Bottom Line

    If you don't plan on overclocking this system and need an all-in-one motherboard, this motherboard has what you need in the way of performance.  But the lack of overclocking options removes it from the overclockers options.  It is ideal if you want to build an small multimedia PC.

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