DFI LanParty and Abit AN7 NFII Ultra Motherboards

Name: DFI LanParty and Abit AN7 NFII Ultra Motherboards - Page 4
Brand: DFI

by HH Staff — Monday, February 23, 2004, 11:00 PM EDT

DFI LANParty NFII Ultra B vs. ABIT AN7
The Clash of the nForce2 Ultra's

By: Tom Laverriere
February 29, 2004

Using the latest version of Business Winstone 2004 and Content Creation Winstone 2004, let's get a feel for real desktop performance from these motherboards. For default test settings we ran our 2800+ CPU using a 10.5X multiplier and a front side bus of 200 MHz giving us 2.1 GHz. This is obviously running our 2800+ at a 3000+ setting, allowing us to take advantage of the full 400MHz System Bus bandwidth of the nForce 2 Ultra 400 chipset.

Business and Content Creation Winstone 2004

Desktop Application Performance

Applications used in the Business Winstone 2004 tests include:

Microsoft® Access 2002 SP-2
Microsoft® Excel 2002 SP-2
Microsoft® FrontPage 2002 SP-2
Microsoft® Outlook 2002 SP-2
Microsoft® PowerPoint 2002 SP-2
Microsoft® Project 2002 SP-2
Microsoft® Word 2002 SP-2
WinZip® 8.1 SR-1
Norton Antivirus? Professional Edition 2003

Applications used in the Content Creation Winstone 2004 tests include:

Adobe® Photoshop® 7.0.1
Adobe® Premiere® 6.50
Macromedia® Director MX 9.0
Macromedia® Dreamweaver MX 6.1
Microsoft® Windows Media? Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980
NewTek's LightWave® 3D 7.5b
Steinberg? WaveLab? 4.0f

It's no surprise to see that both motherboards managed nearly identical scores in these benchmarks, since they are running at the same settings and because the Winstone tests are very hard disk intensive. We have a 7200 RPM Seagate 40GB EIDE drive with an 8MB buffer hooked up for these tests, so we're probably seeing the bottleneck there more than any other component in the system. Next up in our benchmarking queue, we have some high end workstation metrics using SPECViewperf and more overall system measurements using Futuremark's PCMark 2004.

SPECViewperf and PCMark 2004