System Setup and Notes
Hardware
Motherboards
ECS KN1 Extreme, nForce4 Ultra, Socket 939. PCI-E 16x, DDR
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 nForce4 Platform Driver 6.31
NVIDIA 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
We'll be looking at the KN1 Extreme in relation to two other boards - Firstly, an AGP board in the form of NVIDIA's nForce4 predecessor, the nForce3 250GB, courtesy of EpoX's 9NDA3+. Secondly, we'll be comparing this board to ECS' take on the new PCI Express AMD supporting chipset from ATI, the Radeon Xpress 200. All boards were tested using the same Athlon64 4000+ CPU, and memory timings of 2-2-2-5. A GeForce 6800GT was also used on all three motherboards - The AGP variant for the EPoX board, and the PCI Express version for the rest.