Related Articles

Our benchmark system consisted of the following:

• AMD Athlon 64 3000+
• 2x512 MB Crucial Ballistix PC3200 RAM @ 2.5-3-3-8 1T
• Gigabyte K8N Ultra-SLI (nForce 4 SLI)
• Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI (nForce 4 SLI)*
• Soltek K890Pro-939 (VIA K8T890)*
• DFI LanParty NF4 Ultra-D (nForce 4 Ultra)*
• DFI LanParty NF4 SLI-DR (nForce 4 SLI)*
• Western Digital WD1200JD SATA hard drive
• NVIDIA Reference 6600 GT 128 MB PCI-Express

One of the initial frustrations we had with the Gigabyte board were errors and lock ups from various applications. Memory tests and alternate sticks of memory proved to be no avail and there is only a single BIOS revision at this time. After some hours of frustration and troubleshooting, we found that the passive heatsink on the nForce 4 chip was to blame. Although the heatsink was hot to the touch, the MCP was still overheating, causing system instability. Taking the heatsink off, cleaning it (along with the chip), and applying some Arctic Silver 3 fixed all stability issues. The thermal interface pad just wasn't doing its job too well.

While this was a simple fix, it was not one that should have been required in the first place. Quite frankly, I'm surprised that something like this passed Quality Assurance. Anyway, back to the results.

We've got a very nice crop of Socket 939 PCI-Express available to us, which ought to illustrate the performance differences between manufacturers, board versions, and chipsets. For those of you interested primarily in SLI performance, we recommend that you take a look at our Hands On With SLI article as well as our testing of Gigabyte's 3D1 and Leadtek WinFast 6600GT pair.

The nForce 4 version 6.39 driver package was used on the K8N Ultra-SLI and DFI LanParty NF4 SLI-DR, version 6.37 was used on the DFI LanParty NF4 Ultra-D, and an older driver set was used on the K8NXP-SLI. Other drivers used for testing included VIA Hyperion version 4.55 for the Soltek K890Pro-939 and Forceware 66.93 video drivers for all boards.

A list of benchmarks performed follows:

• Business 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