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Test Setup

Test System

AMD XP 2100+ "Thoroughbred"
Thermaltake Volcano 9 cooler
512MB Corsair XMS3200 DDR RAM
512MB Corsair XMS3500 DDR RAM
ATI RADEON 9700 Pro128MB
Seagate 120GB ATA133 Barracuda ST3100

We ran our tests on Windows XP with SP1, using the latest BIOS as of December 15 2002.

All motherboard results, where possible, are obtained with CL2 and "Optimized Defaults".

The tests will be compared against VIA KT400 based motherboards like the Epox 8K9A2+, Soyo KT400 Dragon Ultra and MSI KT4 Ultra boards, which we tested recently.

Note that while the Nforce2 is capable of DualDDR support, our tests were run with a single stick of DDR memory. We may follow up later with DualDDR tests to see whether there is a speed improvement over regular, single stick usage.

PCMark 2002

We always start by examining PCMark2002 scores. The KT4 Ultra performs exceptionally well here, but notice that the K7N2 is not far behind, and in fact performs faster than any other board we've tested after the KT4 Ultra.

Sisoft Sandra 2003

Sisoft Sandra's CPU benchmarks (both CPU bench and CPU Multimedia bench) place the K7N2 at the very top of the pile.

And the memory bandwidth tests put the K7N2 in the second spot.

For these results we only have a limited subset comparison because we recently moved to Sandra2003, whose numbers cannot be compared with Sandra 2002 numbers.