Related Articles

Our benchmark system (and competitors) consisted of the following:

• Intel Pentium 4 560 (Prescott 3.6 GHz, 800 MHz FSB, LGA775)
• Gigabyte 8N-SLI Royal (nForce 4)
• ASUS P5ND2 (nForce 4)
• 2*512 MB Corsair XMS2 PC5400UL @ 3-2-2-2-7-2T 667 MHz
• Abit AA8XE (Intel 925XE)
• Intel nForce 4 Reference
• Gigabyte 8ANXP-D (Intel 925X)
• Western Digital WD1200JD SATA hard drive
• NVIDIA Reference 6600 GT 128 MB PCI-Express

We have quite a variety of Pentium 4 motherboards to compare against here, including the nForce 4 for Intel NVIDIA reference board. We did not include any Athlon 64 competitors, as this is a motherboard review, not a processor review. The purpose here is to see how the Gigabyte 8N-SLI Royal compares to other motherboards when using the same processor.

Driver versions used were Intel Chipset Software version 6.2.1.1001, NVIDIA nForce 4 version 6.53, and NVIDIA Forceware version 66.93.

A list of benchmarks performed follows:

• Business Winstone 2004
• Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004
• LAME MP3
• Rightmark Audio
• SiSoft Sandra
• TMPGEnc MPEG2 Encoding
• XviD Encoding
• Call of Duty
• Comanche 4
• Doom 3
• Half-Life 2
• Halo
• Jedi Knight 2
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• X2 Rolling Demo