Related Articles

SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth

The DFI board leads our ASUS board by approximately 40 MB/s in both integer and floating point memory bandwidth. Since both boards were tested with virtually the same OCZ memory at identical 2.5-3-3-8 1T timings, I'm sure this slight lead can be explained by minor tweaks that DFI has made to their board's BIOS/chipset. In any case, memory bandwidth scores for both motherboards are still very impressive.

WinRAR Compression

The WinRAR compression algorithm is extremely sensitive to memory timings, as Bill has noted in past reviews. We can see here that whatever gave the DFI board a lead in Sandra's memory bandwidth benchmark is doing the same for WinRAR.

HDTach SATA

Since our standard motherboard benchmark platform now includes a Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 SATA2 drive as part of the HDTach SATA testing, do not be surprised by the extremely high burst read results. SATA2 has a maximum theoretical bandwidth that is twice that of the older SATA standard, and while this increase does not necessarily translate to real-world performance increases for the most part, it does allow for much higher burst read possibilities.

We can see here that between both motherboards, burst and average read scores are identical, but the ASUS A8N32-SLI pulls in those performance numbers with a 7% CPU utilization, while the DFI handles it without any measurable increase in CPU utilization. Overall, I'd have to call the DFI the definite winner here.

HDTach IDE

The ASUS board completely eats our DFI for breakfast when it comes to IDE performance. Not only are burst read speeds significantly higher, but it is all done at a lower CPU utilization. Good stuff.

HDTach USB 2.0

Both of our boards have very good USB 2.0 implementations, though the ASUS is just under 2 MB/s faster.

HDTach has shown us that it's a toss-up between the ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe and DFI LanParty nF4 SLI-DR -- one is great for IDE, while the other is great for SATA. You be the judge.