Shuttle SN25P XPC (nForce 4 Ultra)
How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test systems for this review, we first entered their system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults." The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP2) was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed the rest of the necessary drivers and removed Windows Messenger from the system. 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.
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| SYSTEM 1: AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (2.4GHz) Shuttle SN25P XPC (FN25 nForce 4 Ultra) 2x512MB Corsair PC3200 CL 2-2-2-5 GeForce 6800 GT On-board Ethernet On-board Audio WD "Raptor" HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 nForce 4 Drivers v6.53 NVIDIA Forceware v71.89 DirectX 9.0c |
SYSTEM 2: AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (2.4GHz) MSI K8N Neo4 Ultra (nForce 4 Ultra) 2x512MB Corsair PC3200 CL 2-2-2-5 GeForce 6800 GT On-board Ethernet On-board Audio WD "Raptor" HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 nForce 4 Drivers v6.53 NVIDIA Forceware v71.89 DirectX 9.0c |
SYSTEM 3: AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (2.4GHz) Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI (nForce 4 SLI) 2x512MB Corsair PC3200 CL 2-2-2-5 GeForce 6800 GT Onboard Ethernet Onboard Audio WD "Raptor" HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 nForce 4 Drivers v6.53 Forceware v71.89 DirectX 9.0c |
SYSTEM 2: Pentium 4 EE 3.73GHz (LGA 775) NVIDIA Reference Mobo (nForce 4 SLI IE) 2x512MB Corsair DDR2-667 CL 3-2-2-7 GeForce 6800 GT On-board Ethernet On-board Audio WD "Raptor" HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 nForce 4 Drivers v7.02 NVIDIA Forceware v71.89 DirectX 9.0c |
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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) with the Shuttle SN25P XPC. All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor and memory running at their default clock speeds of 2.4GHz and 200MHz (DDR400).
;) Processor Benchmark |
;) Multimedia Benchmark |
;) Memory Benchmark |
The Shuttle SN25P XPC performed exactly as expected in the three SANDRA performance modules we ran. The CPU Arithmetic Benchmark had the Athlon 64 4000+ powered SN25P finishing just behind a higher clocked Opteron, and the Multimedia Benchmark reported scores on par with every other nForce 4 motherboard we've tested. SANDRA's Memory Bandwidth Benchmark reported integer and floating point numbers just over the 6GB/s mark, which also falls in line with similarly equipped systems.
