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| The Test Machine |
| Ready to Rock |
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Motherboard:
NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400GB Reference Motherboard
DFI LANParty nForce2 Ultra 400 Motherboard
Common Hardware and Software:
AMD Athlon XP 2800+ Barton Processor 333MHz FSB
2 x 256MB Kingston HyperX PC3500 Memory
AOpen Aeolus FX5600S 256MB (Drivers - v.56.72 WHQL)
Seagate 40GB ATA-100 7200RPM Hard Drive
On-Board Sound
WinXP Professional w/ SP1
DirectX 9.0b
NVIDIA Unified Drivers v.4.24
Test Settings:
To start things off we ran the NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400Gb motherboard through a round of synthetic tests using SANDRA CPU, Multimedia, and Memory tests. Below are the scores for this motherboard at both default and overclocked settings. We kept the memory on somewhat aggressive timings of 6-3-3-2 for both default and overclocked tests.
Sandra Testing: Default Settings DDR333
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Sandra CPU
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Sandra Multimedia
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Sandra Memory
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Sandra Testing: Overclocked DDR398
Sandra CPU
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Sandra Multimedia
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Sandra Memory
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These scores are right on par with other nForce2 Ultra motherboards we have already seen in the HotHardware labs. The only scores that stray a bit from the norm are the Memory scores. The lower score at default settings has to do with the fact that we were running at 333MHz front side bus which came in at 2283 MB/s while the overclocked scores came in at 2719 MB/s. Even the overclocked scores registered on the low side despite running at a 398MHz front side bus and a little over 2.4 GHz CPU speed. This is typical of reference boards, as they are geared more for stability then speed. Motherboard manufacturers will generally wring more performance out a chipset with retail-ready product.
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| ZD eTesting Labs Business and Content Creation Winstones |
| Desktop Application Performance |
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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
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
As you can see from the graphs, these boards are pretty much running stride for stride in the Winstone Benchmarks. The nForce2 Ultra 400Gb held onto a slight lead, but these numbers are within the margin of error for these particular tests.
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