Stability & Compatibility
You can review our stability/compatibility testing methods here.
Test System
- 2200+ AMD Athlon XP
- 40GB Maxtor ATA100 Hard Disk Drive
- 16x DVD-ROM
- Epox 8RDA3+
- Crucial 512MB DDR400 2x256MB sticks
- MSI Ti4200 8x running 250/514 core/memory using 44.03 Detonator FX drivers
- Base System specs
Stability and compatibility is excellent on the 8RDA3+. Anytime we do a motherboard review, we run Prime95 for 24 hours and Passmark BurnInTest Pro for 12 hours. In addition, I played various games and applications with the 8RDA3+ over a period of 7 days. Basically, instead of just running the stress tests, I used the system in everyday use for a week. After all, what good's a motherboard if you don't use it for everyday applications?
Compatibility testing was done with our in house hardware. I tested 4 Hard Drives (WD 120GB HDD ATA100 2MB cache, Maxtor 120GB HDD ATA133 2MB cache, 60GB WD HDD ATA100 2MB cache, 30GB Maxtor HDD ATA66 2MB cache). All four hard drives were correctly identified by the BIOS and the appropriate IDE mode was automatically identified and applied. 2 video cards were also tested, a AIW 9700 Pro and our standard Geforce4 Ti4200 8x test card. Both were correctly identified by the 8RDA3+ as AGP8x supporting cards.
Performance
Performance is exactly in-line with other nForce2 motherboards. In fact, on the tests, all scores are almost identical to the scores done on the Soltek SL75-MRN-L motherboard. This is an excellent performing nForce2 board, that keeps up surprisingly well with systems that have a nominally faster CPU (for example, the P4 2.8 GHz with a Asus P4C800 Deluxe reviewed by Doc here scored within 400 3dmarks in 2001SE and about 5 fps faster in Quake3 Arena, but faster than other motherboards with the same CPU.
