Review: EPoX 9NDA3 S939 nForce3 Ultra

by Tarinder Sandhu on 1 December 2004, 00:00

Tags: EPoX

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qa47

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Pifast, ScienceMark 2.0, MP3





Looking at memory bandwidth first, it appears as if all S939 AMD motherboards are much of a muchness. You don't need to be rocket scientist to understand why. AMD's decision to integrate the memory controller on the CPU takes away advantages that rival chipsets' north bridges may have. You certainly won't see performance improvements the likes of VIA's KT266 to KT266A.



Latency analysis also follows the rule discussed above. A by-product of a memory controller running at full core speed, in this case 2400MHz, is reduced latency when compared to a traditional north bridge-housed implementation.



Applying both latency and bandwidth to Pifast shows very little performance deviation from 3 S939 chipsets. HEXUS has a Pifast competition based on this motherboard benchmark. You can download it here. Mind you, you'll need to have a PC that can outmuscle an AMD Athlon 64 FX running at an unholy 3.724GHz.



Crunching over 600MB wave files into 192kb/s MP3 format takes the same amount of time, 2m 42s, on each AMD motherboard. Intel's 3.8GHz Prescott CPU manages to pull ahead by a small margin. Remember, it's running at a clock speed that's over 70% higher.