Test Setup
Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service
Pack 2 (2600.xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158)
Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+, MMX,
3DNow (2 CPUs), ~2.2GHz
Memory: 2048MB RAM
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
Card name: NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GT
Driver Version: 6.14.0010.9131
Comparison Motherboards: Foxconn 590 SLI, MSI 570 SLI
CPUs: AMD
Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Dual Core AM2 Processor
Going up against the MSI K9N Diamond Motherboard will be two
nForce based motherboards in the form of the Foxconn 590 SLI and
the MSI K9N SLI Platinum. The setups all share similar peripheral
components, using the latest BIOS and drivers at the time of testing.
Test Software is as follows:
SiSoft
Sandra 2007 - Our standard synthetic suite gets an upgrade.
We like to use Sandra (System ANalyser, Diagnostic
and Reporting Assistant) to collect some numbers
as a base. The numbers collected are consistent and are easily
comparable between systems during tests.
PiFast
- A
good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is PiFast
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.
CDex
Audio Conversion Wav to MP3 - CDex v170b2 was used
to convert a 440.5MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3. Times
are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.
TMPGEnc
4.0 XPress v4.2.1.188 - We used an Animatrix file, titled
The
Second Renaissance Part 1, 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.
DVD
Shrink - We ripped the War of the Worlds bonus feature off
the disk at 100% and compressed the file from the hard drive to
70%. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.
Photoshop
CS2 Driver Heaven Test - Photoshop is perhaps the defacto
standard when it comes to photo editing tools. Given that it is
so popular, we incorporated DriverHeaven's latest test into our
review process. Lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.
3DMark06
- We run the full suite of tests offered by 3DMark06 at 640x480
and collect the total 3DMark score and CPU score.
Doom 3, Far Cry, Unreal Tournament 2004 @ 640x480, HQ Settings
- While higher resolutions tax the video card, lower resolutions
rely on CPU and subsystem speed. Higher scores are better.
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 2007 CPU
SiSoft Sandra 2007 MMX
SiSoft Sandra 2007 Memory
All three boards are within percentage points of
one another, with none holding a clear and distinct edge.
PiFast
Both MSI boards are over 2 seconds faster than the
Foxconn. Despite the "mainstream" chipset, the K9N Platinum
does very well against the K9N Diamond.
CDeX
The K9N Diamond is the fastest board in this test,
beating Foxconn by one second and the MSI 570 SLI by 3 seconds.
TMPGEnc
Another close race between the two MSI boards. The
Diamond leads the way by one second over the second place Platinum.
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