We do testing in a couple of ways around the lab especially when we receive new to market products that have yet to be fully tested by the masses. For our standard comparisons tests we use our Intel LGA775 3.4GHz EE, dual WD 74GB Raptors in a RAID 0 array and 2X512MB sticks of Crucial Ballistix, these tests are what make up our comparison charts and are maintained for integrity and accuracy between tests. For this round of tests, we used a few different CPUs and many different types of memory for compatibility reasons, and to see what memory would post and clear in the Windows environment. We used Mushkin, GEIL, and Wintec memory in these tests. We ran actual benchmark tests with Crucial, Corsair and Kingston as they are the top three memory manufactures and the board worked fine with all three brands.
All comparison scores shown below were based off our standard test parts and tests we use in every review for a balanced comparison. The board performed very well and much like a 925XE board from Intel, which is okay in my book and showed itself to be multi-part part friendly as it functioned with whatever part we used in it. We stuck a Creative Audigy2 card in and there were no problems seen with it either or with the lackluster, but functional on-board audio. I think NVIDIA has done a good job with pre-qualifying the board and chipset before its release as everything ran smooth throughout the testing and general usage of the board. As far as raw performance goes, it did beat out the Intel 925XE chipset boards by a small margin, but beat it, it did. SLI only enhances the performance in applications that recognize the SLI configuration, in some cases were SLI is not fully supported the scores may actually be lower than a single card solution. NVIDIA has released new drivers that now support many more game titles and will continually be updating their support base in this regard.
Test System
- Motherboard: NVIDIA Reference nForce4 SLI Intel Edition
- CPUs: Intel LGA774 3.4GHzEE/3.46GHzEE/3.73GHzEE
- Memory: 512MBX2 DDR2 Corsair XMS2 5400UL/Crucial Ballistix/Kingston Hyper X
- Hard Drives:Dual WD 74GB Raptors in a RAID 0 array
- Audio: Onboard/ Creative Audigy2
- Cooling: Intel Retail Heatsink/Fan
- VGA: Single and SLI NVIDIA Reference 6800GT cards
- CD: Sony 16X PATA
- Power: Epower 600W SLI ready
- High Speed PC Test Station
Test Software
OpenGL
DirectX tests
- 3dmark 2003
- 3dmark 2005
- Aquamark 3
- Half Life 2 C17 timedemo
Memory Tests
- Sandra 2005 Memory bandwidth benchmark
- PCMark Memory benchmark
Real World Tests
