Benchmarks II
The differences between the test boards will only be highlighted by benchmarking numbers. The gap from first to last is minimal. On to gaming and 3DMark 2001SE v330.
With our Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB card, the Canterwood boards have the necessary extra bandwidth oomph to surpass the 18,000 mark barrier. It's a little strange to see an AMD outfit above a dual-channel Intel offering here. The Springdale (bar the ASUS P4P800) falls down in the pure bandwidth-driven lobby tests.
Serious Sam 2 now. Sierra De Chiapas demo at 1024x768x32 Quality settings.
The recurring words that spring into our head are 'last but by no means slow'.
Comanche 4 is a lover of Intel CPUs and motherboards, so much so that the leading AMD / nForce2 combination falls over 10% behind the IS7. This brings home the fact that no matter how fast your chosen combination, certain optimisations can radically boost an architecture's performance. Sadly for AMD presently, many optimisations are carried under the banner of SSE2. The Hammer should right this wrong.