Test Setup
MSI P4N Diamond: Intel 3.73GHz Extreme Edition,
2 x 512MB Corsair TWIN2X PC5400, 2 x NX6800GT, 73GB WD Raptor,
Windows XP SP1.
NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI: Intel 3.73GHz Extreme Edition,
2 x 512MB Corsair TWIN2X PC5400, 2 x NX6800GT, 73GB WD Raptor,
Windows XP SP1.
VIA PT894: Intel 3.73GHz Extreme Edition, 2 x 512MB
Corsair TWINX PC4400, MSI NX6800GT, 73GB WD Raptor, Windows XP
SP1.
EPoX EP-5LWA+ 925XE: Intel 3.73GHz Extreme Edition,
2 x 512MB Corsair TWIN2X PC5400, MSI NX6800GT, 73GB WD Raptor,
Windows XP SP1.
ASUS P5WD2 Premium 955X: Intel 3.73GHz Extreme Edition,
2 x 512MB Corsair TWIN2X PC5400, MSI NX6800GT, 73GB WD Raptor,
Windows XP SP1.
Going up against the MSI P4N Diamond will be a reference NVIDIA
nForce 4 SLI, the EPoX EP-5LWA+ (a 925XE based board), the ASUS
P5WD2 Premium (955X based) and the reference VIA PT894 PT Series.
The setups all share similar peripheral components, except the
PT Series which will be running Corsair DDR ram rather than DDR2
since our board did not support it. Except for the gaming tests,
all the application testing will be done with only one MSI NX6800GT
on the SLI boards.
Onboard audio was enabled in the BIOS for all the boards, but
not used during game testing. All tests on the nForce 4 boards
was done with SLI enabled. Any system tweaks and ram timings were
configured to the best possible for each platform. All benchmarks
will be run a total of three times with the average scores being
displayed.
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.
SYSMark 2004 Office and Content Creation - A scripted
benchmark using real-world applications. Like the SiSoft tests,
higher numbers are better.
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.
TMPGEnc
2.521 - 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.
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 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. Bench'emAll
was used to collect numbers from Far Cry and UT2004.
Sisoft Sandra 2005 CPU
Sisoft Sandra 2005 MMX
Sisoft Sandra 2005 Memory
In our SiSoft Sandra tests, all the boards performed
very closely with one another. The CPU and MMX scores have almost
no difference between them, but the memory scores tell another
tale. Both the nForce 4 SLI and Intel 955X are much stronger in
this area thanks to each chipset's memory controllers and support
for better memory timings.
SYSMark 2004 Office and Content Creation
Here's another one that's too close to call. Overall,
the 955X wins out just barely. The MSI P4N Diamond is slightly
quicker than NVIDIA's reference board, good enough for a second
place overall tie with the 925XE chipset.
NEXT
