Asus A8N SLI Premium - NF4 SLI For AMD Refined
Cinebench and 3DMark 05
The Cinebench 2003 benchmark is an OpenGL 3D rendering performance test, based on the commercially available Cinema 4D application. This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a single 3D scene and tracks the length of the entire process. The time it took each test system to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below (listed in seconds).
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Since we're working with all single-thread only capable Athlon 64 configurations here, we ran Cinebench's single processor test exclusively. Although if we ran some Pentium 4 Hyperthreading enabled, Pentium 8XX series or Athlon 64 X2 CPUs through the multi-processor settings of this test, we're certain times would be much lower (faster) than what you're seeing here from the Athlon 64 FX-53 we used in testing. This is one application where multi-threaded processing is highly beneficial. However, in our apples to apples test, based on a single Athlon 64 FX-53 core, once again we're witness to utterly identical performance characteristics amongst the motherboards we tested, with the Asus A8N SLI Premium squeaking in a tenth of a second sooner.
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3DMark05's built-in CPU test is a "gaming related" DirectX metric that's useful for comparing relative performance between similarly equipped systems. This test consists of two different 3D scenes that are generated with a software renderer, which is dependant on the host CPU's performance. This means that the calculations normally reserved for your 3D accelerator are instead sent to the central host processor. The number of frames generated per second in each test are used to determine the final score.
Finally, in the 3DMark05 CPU test, we see something noteworthy in terms of relative performance. The A8N SLI Premium musters about a 100 point advantage over its older Deluxe version sibling and nearly that much over the MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI. We're going to attribute this performance delta to perhaps the tighter, more aggressive CPU and HT timings of the A8N SLI Premium but in all candor that's a bit of speculation on our part.
