Asus A8N SLI Premium - NF4 SLI For AMD Refined
PCMark05 CPU and Memory Testing
For our next round of synthetic benchmarks, we ran the CPU and Memory performance modules built into Futuremark's brand new PCMark05. This is the first time we've worked with PCMark 05 and found it to be even more robust in terms of test features, than its predecessor. That said, the CPU and Memory test modules we use for comparison are very similar to the 04 version of the test suite. For those interested in more than just the graphs, we've got a couple of quotes directly from Futuremark that explain exactly what these tests do, and how they work.
 |
|
"The CPU test suite is a collection of tests that are run to isolate the performance of the CPU. The CPU Test Suite also includes multithreading: two of the test scenarios are run multithreaded; the other including two simultaneous tests and the other running four tests simultaneously. The remaining six tests are run single threaded. Operations include, File Compression/Decompression, Encryption/Decryption, Image Decompression, and Audio Compression" - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.
The scores above are no big surprise, as one would expect, most nForce 4 motherboard designs, at stock speeds are generally right on top of each other performance wise. The MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI comes in slightly behind the A8N's but the scores are so close, the difference is negligible.
|
|
"The Memory test suite is a collection of tests that isolate the performance of the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem consists of various devices on the PC. This includes the main memory, the CPU internal cache (known as the L1 cache) and the external cache (known as the L2 cache). As it is difficult to find applications that only stress the memory, we explicitly developed a set of tests geared for this purpose. The tests are written in C++ and assembly. They include: Reading data blocks from memory, Writing data blocks to memory performing copy operations on data blocks, random access to data items and latency testing." - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.
Our PCMark 05 showed a very interesting anomaly we've seen on three different but identical Asus A8N SLI Deluxe boards here at HotHardware, and even when using the PCMark 04 version of the test suite. The A8N SLI Deluxe, for reasons unknown to us at the moment, will lock up in the middle of the 8 or 16MB block write portion of the test. Initially, we thought this was an issue with the processor but we have since determined it to be an A8N SLI Deluxe problem, due to the fact that both the MSI K8N Neo4 SLI and the new A8N SLI Premium are able to complete this test successfully.
