System setup and notes
Hardware
| Motherboard | ASUS M2N32-SLI Premium Vista | Foxconn N570SM2AA | Sapphire PURE AM2RD580 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 (2.8GHz, 2 x 1MiB L2 cache, Socket AM2) | |||
| BIOS revision | 0109 (01/02/07) | 5C4W1P30 (08/07/2006) | 2K060826 (08/26/2006)) | |
| Memory | 2GiB (2 x 1024) Corsair PC8500 EPP | |||
| Memory timings and speed | 4-4-4-12 2T @ 800MHz (PC6400) | 5-4-4-12 2T @ 800MHz (PC6400) | 4-4-4-12 2T @ 800MHz (PC6400) | |
| Graphics Card(s) | ASUS GeForce 7900 GTX 512MiB in SLI | HIS X1900 CROSSFIRE EDITION + Sapphire X1900XTX | ||
| Disk drive(s) | Seagate 160GB SATAII (ST3160812AS) | |||
| Mainboard software | NVIDIA Driver package 9.34 | Catalyst 6.10 Southbridge package | ||
| Graphics driver | ForceWare 91.47 | CATALYST 6.10 BETA | ||
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional, w/ SP2, 32-bit | |||
| 2D Benchmarks |
SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth Float Buffered ScienceMark Memory Latency HEXUS Pifast calculation to 10M places HEXUS WAV encoding HEXUS DivX encoding Cinebench 2003 v9.5 HDTach RW v3.0.1.0 |
|---|
| 3D Benchmarks |
Far Cry v1.33 Quake 4 v1.30 Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory v1.05 |
|---|
Comparison choices
The choice of the nForce SLI 570-based Foxconn N570SM2AA may seem like a strange one but was made to put into perspective the performance difference, or lack of it, between the £150 M2N32-SLI and a board a third its price. The Sapphire PURE AM2RD580 represents a similarly-priced offering utilising ATI CrossFire as opposed to SLI.
Windows XP was used as the operating system of choice to allow comparisons with previous results
Testing notes
Shipping drivers for the integrated ADI1988B audio CODEC did not support DTS. Downloading the latest drivers added DTS support but caused system to hang intermittently during audio playback.
Making adjustments in nTune caused the program to crash. NVMonitor only reports GPU temperature and gives incorrect readings for all fan speeds other than CPU fan.
In Microsoft Windows Vista the ASAP device would sometimes re-detect after a reboot, disabling ReadyBoost.
Running speeds
Benchmark results from chipsets based around the same processor and supporting components tend to be almost identical. That's why we pay attention to the actual speed that the boards run their respective CPUs at.2813.0MHz - 200.9MHz FSB - AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 - Foxconn N570SM2AA - NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI
2812.6MHz - 200.9MHz FSB - AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 - Asus M2N32-SLI Premium Vista Edition - NVIDIA NF5 590 SLI
2800.0MHz - 200.0MHz FSB - AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 - Sapphire AM2RD580 - ATI RD580/SB600