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Hardware Setup

Our benchmark system consisted of the following:

• AMD Athlon 64 3000+
• 2x512 MB OCZ PC4200 RAM
• Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI (nForce 4 SLI)
• Soltek Qbic 3901a (VIA K8T800 Pro)
• Soltek SL-K8TPro-939 (VIA K8T800 Pro)
• Western Digital WD1200JD SATA hard drive
• NVIDIA Reference 6600GT 128MB AGP
• NVIDIA Reference 6600GT 128MB PCIe

We're still working on our collection of 939 PCIe boards so we have the K8NXP-SLI up against a pair of K8T800Pro based boards from Soltek, a desktop board in the SL-K8TPro-939 and the a representative from the SFF segment inthe Qbic 3901a. 6600GT boards are used for both the AGP-based K8T800Pros as well as the PCIe GA-K8NXP-SLI. For those interested in the SLI performance of the board in a decidedly more graphically oriented set of benchmarks, we encourage readers to take a look at our hands-on with SLI as well as our testing of Gigabyte's 3D1. Drivers used for testing included Forceware 66.93 and VIA Hyperion 4.55.

The nForce 4 driver package from Gigabyte was used which included the following:

Audio driver version 4.57 (WHQL)
Audio utility version 4.50
Ethernet NRM driver version 4.59 (WHQL) with 4.62 nvtcp.sys
Network management tools version 4.62
SMBus driver version 4.45 (WHQL) with updated uninstaller files
WinXP IDE 2.7 driver version 4.64 (WHQL) with 4.74 raidtool

We have been sititng on beta drivers from NVIDIA from mid October now for some time and seeing as how we received the board from Gigabyte in December we assume they have their reasons for including not including the 6 series beta on their driver CD. We have done additional testing with both the 6.11 and 6.13 driver set from NVIDIA and the performance was pretty much the same. One thing that the drivers from Gigabyte does not provide access to is the NVIDIA Firewall. We updated the 6.11s and 6.13s to some interesting results.

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