Asus P5WD2 Premium i955X
Cinebench 3D Rendering and 3DMark05
 |
|
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). We ran two sets of numbers, one in single-thread mode, and another in the benchmark's multithread mode for our Hyper-Threading-enabled P4 test systems. Athlon 64s are only capable of running the single thread test, hence their are no multi-cpu scores represented in the graph below.
There's not much that can be said about the Cinebench 3D results; all of our boards are running within tenths of seconds of each other, creating a virtual tie. The only point that we like to make here as that, for the first time in our review, the two i955X boards are at the top of the heap, finally supplanting the nForce 4 SLI boards.
 |
|
3DMark05's built-in CPU test is a "gaming related" DirectX metric that's useful for comparing relative performance among 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.
3DMark05 reversed the trend, sending the nForce 4 SLI boards back to the top of the charts, and that by a considerable amount. The two nForce 4 boards placed over 200 points higher than the Asus P5WD2 Premium, which equates to about a four percent increase in performance. It's the first major difference we have seen so far in testing, and suggests that the nForce 4 boards might have an optimized pathway between the CPU and other components.
