Test Methods and System Setup
Overclocking
The nForce4 Ultra chipset, just like the SLI one, has locks in all the right places. The PCI Express bus is locked independently of the system bus, as is the regular old PCI bus. No AGP card to worry about here either. Throw some Corsair PC4400 DDR memory into the mix and you’ll have a good foundation for some serious overclocking.
For our overclocking tests, I started simply with the basics: move the multiplier down to 9.0x and then up the HT bus to see where it stops me. With upping the internal CPU clock, I reached a bus speed of 265 MHz. Beyond that, I noticed a bit of instability. I then upped the multiplier to 10x making a total frequency of 2.65 GHz and ran completely stable overnight running Prime95 and 3DMark05. Using default voltages, that is a pretty good overclock, at 250 MHz.
I’ll have a new overclocking article up soon where I look at a “Venice” core product.
Test System Setup
Our test setup continues with our trend for motherboard and chipset reviews, using an Athlon 64 4000+ processor and an ATI X800 XT PCI Express graphics card. Since this is a motherboard review, we will focus on what features and performance the motherboard brings to the table in as close a comparison as possible to the competing products.
AMD Test System Setup | |
CPU |
AMD Athlon 64 4000+ |
Motherboards |
Epox 9NPA+ nForce4 Ultra |
Power Supply |
Antec 480 watt |
Memory |
2x512MB Corsair Micro DDR500 |
Hard Drive |
250 GB Maxtor 7200 RPM SATA |
Sound Card |
Creative Labs Live! |
Video Card |
ATI X800 XT |
Video Drivers |
ATI Catalyst 4.11 |
DirectX Version |
DX 9.0c |
Operating System |
Windows XP w/ Service Pack 1 |
Intel Test System Setup | |
CPU |
Intel 560/660 |
Motherboards |
Intel 925XE Reference |
Power Supply |
Antec 480 watt |
Memory |
2x512MB Corsair Micro DDR2-533 |
Hard Drive |
250 GB Maxtor 7200 RPM SATA |
Sound Card |
Creative Labs Live! |
Video Card |
ATI X800 XT |
Video Drivers |
ATI Catalyst 4.11 |
DirectX Version |
DX 9.0c |
Operating System |
Windows XP w/ Service Pack 1 |
The benchmarks used were:
- SiSoft Sandra 2004 SP1
- AIDA32
- Cachemem
- Quake III: Arena
- Unreal Tournament 2003
- X2: The Threat
- 3D Mark 2001: SE v330
- 3DMark03
- Far Cry 1.1
- Doom 3
- PCMark04
- Business Winstone 2004
- Content Creation Winstone 2004
- LAME MP3 Encoding
- XMPEG / DivX Encoding
- WinRAR Compression
- CineBench 2003
- ScienceMark 2.0 Beta