System Setup and Notes
Hardware
Motherboards
EQS A58XK9-ALF, Radeon Xpress 200P, Socket 939. PCI-E 16x, DDR
EPoX 9NDA3+, NVIDIA nForce3 250Gb, Socket 939, AGP 8x, DDR
Processors
AMD Athlon64 4000+, Socket 939, 1MB L2
Graphics Cards
NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT, AGP 8x, 256MB
NVIDIA GeForce 6800GT, PCI-E 16x, 256MB
Memory
1Gb (2 x 512MB) Corsair DDR-I PC-3200 - 2-2-2-5
Hard Disks
1 x 36.6GB Western Digital Raptor SATA
Software
Windows XP Professional w/ SP2NVIDIA nForce3 Platform Driver 5.10
ATI CATALYST IGP driver 4.12
NVIDIA ForceWare 66.93
DirectX 9.0c End User Runtime
HEXUS Pifast
Sciencemark 2.0
KribiBench v1.1
LAME 3.92MMX encoding U2's Pop album at 192CBR
Realstorm Raytracing Benchmark
3DMark 2001SE
3DMark03
Painkiller
Notes
Today's board is going to put to the test against a Socket 939, AGP-based offering, in the form of EpoX's nForce 3 250Gb board, the 9NDA3+. Both boards were equipped with an Athlon64 4000+ and GeForce 6800GT (using AGP and PCI Express variants of the board as required, obviously). Due to the lack of memory timing controls on the EQS board, both boards were run with memory timings from the RAMs SPD - Luckily the Corsair memory used here is rated at 2-2-2-5, so no real performance issues on that count.