The Test

To test performance of the NF4 Ultra-D, we compared it to one other NF4 Ultra board, the Gigabyte K8NX-9.. We also threw in Soltek's SL-K890 Pro-939, which is based on the VIA K8T890 chipset.

Test benches were setup as follows:

CPU: AMD Athlon64 3000+ (Winchester @ 1.8 GHz w/ 512 KB cache)
Memory: Kingston HyperX PC4300 3-4-4-8, 1T timing
Video: GeForce 6600GT PCI-E w/ ForceWare 71.23
Hard Drive: Maxtor Diamondmax 10 7200 RPM 250GB SATA

Chipset Drivers for SL-K890 Pro939 & K8VT890-9 : VIA 4in1 4.55
Chipset Drivers for the Gigabyte K8NXP-9: NVIDIA NF4 Standalone 6.39

OS Version: WinXP Professional w/ SP2, DirectX 9.0c

Thanks to Newegg.com for supplying us with the CPU.

As usual, we start off with a Memory Bandwidth test. Even though the memory controller is on the CPU itself, and these results should be identical, that is not always the case across different chipsets:

As expected, the scores here are nearly identical. This should be expected, because the memory controller is on the CPU itself. Ideally, motherboard shouldn't influence this score at all.

Next Page: (PCMark; CineBench 3D Rendering)

Page 1: Introduction Page 2: Board Layout Page 3: Board Layout Cont'd; Bundle Page 4: CMOS Features Page 5: Benchmark Config; Memory Bandwidth Test Page 6: PCMark; CineBench 3D Rendering Page 7: Gaming Performance Page 8: Ethernet, USB, FireWire Performance Page 9: Audio Quality & Performance Page 10: Worldbench 5 Page 11: Conclusion