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The nForce 4 Family

For further details about the nForce 4 family and features, we encourage readers to check out our preview of the nForce 4 platform where we tackle some of the improvements from the nForce 3 in some more detail. Some of the topics include nTune, the improvements to the Firewall and to the drive controllers.

Hardware & Benchmark Setup

Benchmark Setup

Our benchmark system consisted of the following:

• AMD Athlon 64 3000+
• 2x512 MB OCZ PC4200 RAM
• Western Digital WD1200JD SATA hard drive
• NVIDIA Reference 6600 GT 128 MB PCI-Express
• DFI LanParty nF4 SLI-DR
• DFI LanParty UT nF4 Ultra-D (nForce 4 Ultra)
• Soltek K890Pro-939 (VIA K8T890)
• Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI motherboard (nForce4 SLI)
• Gigabyte K8N Ultra-SLI motherboard (nForce4 SLI)
• OCZ Modstream 520W PSU

NVIDIA's Forceware 66.93 was used for the 6600GT across all platforms. The DFI nF4 SLI-DR was tested with the Forceware 6.39 driver package. The nF4 Ultra-D was tested with the ForceWare 6.37 drivers. VIA's Hyperion 4.55vp1 and the driver revisions for the Gigabyte nForce 4 SLI board can be found here.

A list of benchmarks performed follows:

• PCMag Winstone 2004
• HDTach
• NTTCP
• LAME MP3
• Rightmark Audio
• SiSoft Sandra
• Comanche 4
• Doom 3
• Halo
• Half-Life 2
• Call of Duty
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• X2 Rolling Demo