nForce 4 SLI Motherboard Round-Up
Kribibench v1.1 & Cinebench 2003
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!
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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.
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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.
