Testbed and Methods

Finishing our review of the WinFast NF4UK8AA-8EKRS mainboard we would like to offer you the results of our performance tests. We will compare the speed of this mainboard with that of the earlier tested mainboards on NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra and SLI chipsets, and to the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum which is based on NVIDIA’s previous chipset, the nForce3 Ultra. For the tests to be correct we had to use two analogous graphics cards on the RADEON X800 XT GPU with AGP 8x and PCI Express x16 interfaces. Otherwise the test systems were identical.

So, we used the following hardware in our performance tests:

• AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (2.4GHz, 512KB L2 cache);
• Mainboards:
  • Chaintech VNF4 Ultra VE  (NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra);
  • EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra (NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra);
  • Foxconn WinFast NF4UK8AA-8EKRS (NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra);
  • MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum (NVIDIA nForce3 Ultra);
  • MSI K8N Diamond (NVIDIA nForce4 SLI).
• 1024MB DDR400 SDRAM (Corsair CMX512-3200XLPRO, 2 x 512MB, 2-2-2-10).
• Graphics cards:
  • PowerColor RADEON X800 XT (AGP 8x, 500MHz/500MHz);
  • PowerColor RADEON X800 XT (PCI Express x16, 500MHz/500MHz).
• Western Digital Raptor WD740GD hard disk drive (SATA150).

We performed our tests in Windows XP SP2.