Testbed and Methods
We will wind up our detailed review of the DFI LanParty UT RDX200 CF-DR mainboard with the performance tests. And since this mainboard is based on a relatively rare ATI Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire chipset, we will not stick to just the popular benchmarks. We will also take a look at the performance of different subsystems on this mainboard, which will allow us to make a more complex conclusion about its features.
We will compare DFI LanParty UT RDX200 CF-DR against one of the most popular NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra based mainboards ?DFI LANParty UT NF4 Ultra-D.
So, during our test session we assembled platforms with the following hardware components:
- CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (Venice, 2.4GHz, 512KB L2).
- Mainboards:
- DFI LANParty UT NF4 Ultra-D (NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra);
- DFI LanParty UT RDX200 CF-DR (ATI Radeon Xpress 200 Crossfire).
- Memory: 1024MB DDR400 SDRAM (OCZ EL DDR PC-3500 Gold GX XTC Dual Channel, 2 x 512MB, 2-2-2-10).
- Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX.
- HDD: Western Digital Raptor WD740GD (SATA150).
- OS: Windows XP SP2.
The memory subsystems of the tested mainboards were at their defaults. Note that although both mainboards were designed and made by the same company, they have slightly different memory settings for the same memory modules.
Default timing settings on DFI LanParty UT RDX200 CF-DR.
Default timing settings on DFI LANParty UT NF4 Ultra-D.
However, I have to admit that these differences hardly affect the performance, which was proven by a special test later on.
