nForce 4 SLI Motherboard Round-Up

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 its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults."  We then manually configured our system RAM to run at 200MHz (DDR400), with the timings set by the SPD.  The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP2) was installed. When the installation was complete, we hit the Windows Update site and downloaded all of the available updates, with the exception of the ones related to Windows Messenger (*except for the WorldBench 5 scores.  Those were run on a clean install of XP with only SP2 installed). Then we installed all of the necessary drivers and removed Windows Messenger from the system altogether. Auto-Updating and System Restore were also disabled, and we set up a 768MB 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...

Test System Specifications "AMD Inside!"

Preliminary Benchmarks with SiSoft SANDRA 2005 Synthetic Testing

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 subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2005 suite (CPU, Multimedia, and Memory).  All of these tests were run with our processor set to its default clock speed of 2.4GHz (12x200MHz).  (Note: Some of these boards ran the processor with a default FSB higher than 200MHz. Where necessary, we manually set the FSB to 200MHz to keep the playing field level.)

CPU DFI LANParty NF4 SLI-DR	CPU MSI K8N Neo 4 Platinum/SLI	CPU Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI
Multimedia DFI LANParty NF4 SLI-DR	Multimedia MSI K8N Neo 4 Platinum/SLI	Multimedia Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI
Memory DFI LANParty NF4 SLI-DR	Memory MSI K8N Neo 4 Platinum/SLI	Memory Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI

All three of the nForce 4 SLI powered motherboards we tested performed similarly in SANDRA's CPU, Multimedia, and Memory benchmark modules.  The DFI LANParty NF4 SLI-DR finished all three of the tests just slightly ahead of the MSI and Gigabyte boards, but the differences were not dramatic.  Because the Athlon 64's memory controller is integrated into the CPU, specialized synthetic tests like these that focus solely on processor and memory performance, usually don't show much variation when testing systems that are configured with the exact same components.