Bios and System Setup
This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.
For a low cost motherboard, the Soltek NV400 motherboard has quite a lot of overclocking and other BIOS options that enthusiasts are used to seeing. The front side bus can be adjusted up to 250 MHz in the bios and the normal memory timing settings are available as well (RAS, RCD, CAS). You can edit the AGP frequency independently of the others as well, which is common among the nF2 motherboards now.
There is also a reasonable amount of voltage control on the Soltek board as well. The multiplier goes up to 22x and the voltages have highs at around 0.2v higher than the defaults, so AGP: 1.8v, DIMM: 2.8v, CPU: 1.85v, VDD: 1.8v.
(Don’t mind the distortions on these photos, it turned out to be a dying Radeon 9700 Pro card.)
System Setup
I decided the best way to test the new NVIDIA chipset was against its big brother, the nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset. Using the latest in hardware in every aspect, including the 3200+ 400 MHz FSB Barton and the Asus A7N8X Deluxe motherboard – by far the most popular nF2 board available.
I tested the Soltek board with a single DIMM as well as with two DIMMs, and the scores were close enough for the difference to be negligible. Because, again, the NV400 is only a single channel memory motherboard, using one or two DIMMs makes no really performance difference. The same cannot be said of the nF2 400 Ultra in the Asus A7N8X board. All the memory timings were kept the same for each board (6-2-2 2.0)
| CPU | 1 x 2.20 GHz AMD Athlon XP 3200+ Processor |
| Motherboard |
Soltek NV400-64 nForce2 400 Motherboard Asus A7N8X nForce2 Ultra 400 Rev 2.0 Motherboard |
| Memory | 2 x 256MB Corsair Micro XMS3500 DDR DRAM |
| Hard Drive | 80 GB 7200 RPM IBM EIDE |
| Video Card | ATI Radeon 9700 Pro |
| Video Drivers | 61.66 |
| Operating System | Windows XP w/ Service Pack 1 |
Tests:
Quake III: Arena
Unreal Tournament 2003
3DMark 2001: SE
SiSoft Sandra Memory Bench
SiSoft Sandra CPU Bench
PC Mark 2002
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2002
Content Creation Winstone 2003
Business Winstone 2001
Business Winstone 2002
SPECviewperf 7
Cachemem
ScienceMark
