Asus P5N32-SLI Deluxe nForce4 SLI X16 Intel Edition
Testing Configuration and SANDRA Scores
How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test systems for this review, we first entered the system BIOS and set each board to their "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults" settings. The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 was installed. Then we installed all of the necessary drivers, and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were also disabled, and we setup a 1536MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance", installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives and ran all of the tests.
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| Motherboards Tested: Asus P5N32-SLI Deluxe (nForce 4 SLI X16 Intel Edition) MSI P4N Diamond (nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition) Abit AW8-MAX (Intel i955X) Asus P5WD2 Premium (Intel i955X) Common Hardware: Intel Pentium 4 550 Processor @ 3.4GHz 2x512MB Corsair XMS2 Pro DDR2-667 (CL 4-4-4-12) nVidia GeForce 7800GT On-board audio & LAN Seagate Barracuda V SATA Hard Drive Software / System Drivers: |
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We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. SANDRA consists of a set of information and diagnostic utilities that can provide a host of useful information about your hardware and operating system. We ran three of the built-in sub-system tests (CPU Arithmetic, CPU Multimedia, and Memory Bandwidth) that partially comprise the SANDRA 2005 suite of benchmarks. All of these tests were run with the Asus P5N32 powered by an Intel Pentium 4 550 3.4 GHz CPU with 1GB of Corsair XMS2 Pro DDR2 and compared against similar systems from SANDRA's database.
;) SANDRA CPU Arithmetic Benchmark Pentium 4 550 @ 3.4GHz 1024MB DDR2 (CL4) |
;) SANDRA Memory Benchmark Pentium 4 550 @ 3.4GHz 1024MB DDR2 (CL4) |
;) SANDRA CPU Multimedia Benchmark Pentium 4 550 @ 3.4GHz 1024MB DDR2 (CL4) |
SANDRA's CPU Arithmetic and Multimedia benchmarks had the Asus P5N32 slightly behind the sample P4 550 scores from the database, and were also lower than what we saw with Abit's AW8-MAX or the Asus P5WD2. Memory bandwidth, as shown in the Memory Bandwidth Benchmark, was also off the mark. When compared to the i955X boards, the bandwidth was close to 200MB/s lower on the P5N32.
