nForce 4 SLI Motherboard Round-Up

Name: nForce 4 SLI Motherboard Round-Up - Page 16
Brand: nForce

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, March 30, 2005, 06:00 PM EDT

Next up, we ran the Kribibench rendering benchmark produced by the folks at Adept Development. Kribibench is an SSE aware software renderer. A 3D model is rendered and animated by the host CPU, and the average frame rate is reported. We used two of the included models with this benchmark: an "Exploding Sponge" model consisting of over 19.2 million polygons and an absolutely gargantuan "Ultra" model that is comprised of over 16 billion polys!

Kribibench v1.1

Details: www.adeptdevelopment.com

DFI's LANParty NF4 SLI-DR jumped back into the lead in both of the Kribibench rendering tests. It was only marginally faster than either of the other NF4 SLI based boards, though. And as you can see, the Pentium 4 smoked the Athlons here.

Cinebench 2003 Performance Tests

3D Modeling & Rendering Tests

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 the "WNRs" in the graph below.

The Cinebench 2003 results were all similar, with all three of the nForce 4 SLI based motherboards we tested finishing within a fraction of a second of each other. The DFI board technically had the lead, followed by the Gigabyte board, and then the MSI board, but with only .3 seconds separating the first and third place finishers it's hard to say any one board was really faster than another; .3 seconds falls well within the margin of error in this test.

Tags: nforce, sli, Motherboard, round-up, force, board, AR

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com