Nvidia nForce3 Ultra Motherboard Roundup --- TheThirdMedia Hardware

Test Setup

We will now continue into our benchmarking section of our roundup. All three boards were set setup on our testbed using a standard set of components to maintain benchmark consistency. We test each board individually with a reformatted hard disk and a clean install of Windows, drivers and all benchmark applications.

Primary components used for all tests are as follows:-

AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2GHz)

2 x 512MB Corsair DDR400

Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)

Gigabyte GeForce FX 5900 XT 128MB - with NVIDIA Detonator XP 66.93 driver

NVIDIA nForce drivers 5.10

Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1 (with DirectX 9.0c)

As a standard practice, all our benchmarking sessions are done using the same set of memory parameters to ensure that scores are not adversely affected. However, special occasions may arise where a board requires alternative timing parameters in order to complete benchmarking. In this case, the standard memory timings and configurations used for this roundup is listed within the table below:-

DDR Memory Timing Used For Benchmarking

Motherboard	DefaultMemory Timing	Remarks
EPoXEP-9NDA3J	6-3-3CAS 2.5 CMD 2T	2TCMD timings had to be used for all benchmarks to maintain stability
GigabyteGA-K8NS-939	6-3-3CAS 2.5 CMD 1T	-
MSIK8N Neo2 Platinum	6-3-3CAS 2.5 CMD 1T	-

The following benchmarks are used throughout our benchmarking in this roundup:-

SPEC CPU2000 v1.2

BAPco SYSmark 2004

Futuremark PCMark04

SPECviewperf 8.01

Lightwave 3D 7.5

Futuremark 3DMark2001 SE

Futuremark 3DMark03

AquaMark3

Unreal Tournament 2004

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