NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition
For our next round of synthetic benchmarks, we ran the CPU and Memory performance modules built into Futuremark's PCMark04. For those interested in more than just the graphs, we've got a couple of quotes directly from Futuremark that explain exactly what these tests do, and how they work.
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"The CPU test suite is a collection of tests that are run to isolate the performance of the CPU. There are nine tests in all. Two pairs of tests are run multithreaded - each test in the pair is run in its own thread. The remaining five tests are run single threaded. These tests include such functions as file encryption, decryption, compression and decompression, grammar check, audio conversion, WMV and DivX video compression."
From this point forward, we've included some benchmark scores from an NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI based system, powered by an Athlon 64 4000+ for reference.
PCMark04's CPU performance module had all of the Intel powered systems finishing within 1 percent of one another, which is to be expected. And because this benchmark is influenced by the higher-clock speed and HyperThreading capabilities of Intel's processors, the Pentium 4 powered systems easily outpaced the Athlon 64 4000+ here.
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"The Memory test suite is a collection of tests that isolate the performance of the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem consists of various devices on the PC. This includes the main memory, the CPU internal cache (known as the L1 cache) and the external cache (known as the L2 cache). As it is difficult to find applications that only stress the memory, we explicitly developed a set of tests geared for this purpose. The tests are written in C++ and assembly. They include: Reading data blocks from memory, Writing data blocks to memory performing copy operations on data blocks, random access to data items and latency testing."
Testing with PCMark04's memory performance module corroborated the results found with SANDRA's memory bandwidth benchmark. In this test, the nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition took first and second place. With the NF4 Intel Edition's memory clocked at 667MHz, it outpaced the i925XE by about 12%, and with its memory clocked at the same 533MHz the NF4 SLI Intel Edition still beat i925XE by a sizable margin. At 533MHz, the NF4 SLI finished this test with a score roughly 8.2% higher than the i925XE.
