System setup and notes
Hardware
| System | MSI K9A Platinum AM2 System | ASUS Crosshair AM2 system | Foxconn 975X7AB System |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 (2.8GHz, 2 x 1MiB L2 cache, Socket AM2) | Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93GHz, 4MiB L2 cache, LGA775) | |
| Motherboard | MSI K9A Platinum AM2 (CrossFire Xpress3200) | ASUS Crosshair AM2 (nForce590 SLI) | Foxconn 975X7AB (i975X) |
| Memory | 2GiB (2 x 1024) Corsair PC8500 | ||
| Memory timings and speed | 4-4-4-12 2T @ 800MHz (PC6400) | ||
| Graphics card(s) | HIS X1900 CROSSFIRE EDITION + Sapphire X1900XTX | GeForce 7900 GTX 512MiB in SLI | HIS X1900 CROSSFIRE EDITION + Sapphire X1900XTX |
| Disk drive(s) | Seagate 160GB SATAII (ST3160812AS) | ||
| BIOS revision | 1.2B1 (07/17/06) | 0121 (07/24/06) | 635F1D08 (09/08/2006) |
| Mainboard software | Catalyst 6.8 Southbridge package | ForceWare 9.34 | Intel Inf Update 8.0.1.1002 |
| Graphics driver | CATALYST 6.8 | ForceWare 91.27 | CATALYST 6.8 |
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional, w/ SP2, 32-bit | ||
Software
We ran the mainboards through our usual array of benchmarks.| 2D Benchmarks |
ScienceMark Memory Bandwidth ScienceMark Memory Latency HEXUS Pifast calculation to 10M places HEXUS WAV encoding HEXUS DivX encoding Cinebench 2003 v9.5 HDTach 3RW |
|---|
| 3D Benchmarks |
Far Cry v1.33 Quake 4 v1.04 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory |
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Notes
As always, we ran each benchmark a trio of times, discarding the outer results and reporting the middle one. If any of the three results looked erroneous, we threw all three away until we could collect three within a margin of statistical error. We report any major attempts needed to get three reliable results, of course. Apart from that, things are as noted on the graphs and in the graph commentary. Want to know more? Head for the HEXUS.community.We're comparing the MSI ATi-powered board against a premier nForce590 SLI mainboard from ASUS, to see how the chipset stacks up in competition. We've also added benchmarks from a decent i975X chipset-based motherboard from Foxconn, sporting the impressive Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU, so you have a choice of high-end motherboards on AM2 going up against the performance choice of the last 3 months.