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Hardware Setup

Long gone are the days where SFF systems can claim that they are merely SFFs to account for a performance delta. The KL-I915A will be pitted against other 915 based systems, a 925XE as well as NVIDIA's nForce 4 for Intel solution.

• Intel Pentium 4 560 (3.6 Ghz Prescott)

• OCZ PC4200 EL Platinum Edition

• Corsair CM2X512A-5400UL Memory

• Kloss KL-I915A SFF

• NVIDIA nForce 4 for Intel Reference Motherboard

• ABIT AA8XE 925XE Motherboard

• Soltek SL-915GPro-FGR

• Soltek Qbic EQ3501 915G SFF

• NVIDIA 6600GT Reference Board

• Western Digital WD1200 SATA HD

All three of the 915 based solutions made use of the OCZ PC4200 modules with the standard SPD timings of 2.5-3-3-8. The Corsair modules were run at DDR2-667 speeds on both the nForce and 925XE boards at timings of 3-2-2-7. The nForce 4 had the benefit of 1T timings whlie the 925XE was stuck at 2T. ForceWare 66.93 drivers were used for all configurations. The Kloss was tested using BIOS version 1.05 with C-Media's Azalia Driver revision of UDAX008 56.62 and Intel's chipset driver revision 6.2.1.1001. Further details about specific benchmark configurations for each of the boards included can be found in the links above.

A list of benchmarks performed follows:

• PCMag Business Winstone 2004
• PCMag Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004
• HDTach
• NTTCP
• LAME MP3
• AutoGK XviD Encoding
• TmpGenc MPEG2 Encoding
• Rightmark Audio Tests
• SiSoft Sandra Memory Benchmark
• Comanche 4
• Doom 3
• Halo
• Half-Life 2
• Call of Duty
• Jedi Knight 2
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• X2 Rolling Demo