Date:
Monday , December 09, 2002
Author:
Trey Shewmake
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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ASUS A7N8X nForce2

The ASUS A7N8X is one of the first incarnations of the nVidia nForce2 chipset-based motherboards to hit retail shelves. We have seen good and bad previews of the technology. How will it look when it gets to your box?

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Reference Platforms

ASUS A7N8X: AMD AthlonXP 2400+ CPU (clocked at 12x166 for 1992MHz CPU speed, and at 10x200MHz for 2000MHz CPU speed); 2 x 256MB Corsair XMS3200; ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, onboard nForce2 10/100 NIC; 40 GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD, Zalman 300w PSU. WindowsXP w/SP1, ATi Catalyst 2.3.

ABIT AT7-MAX2: AMD AthlonXP 2400+ CPU (clocked at 15x133MHz for 2GHz clock speed and at 11.5x173MHz for 1.99GHz clock speed); 2 x 256MB Corsair XMS3200; ATI Radeon 9700 Pro; internal 10/100 NIC; 40 GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD, Zalman 300w PSU. Windows XP w/SP1, ATi Catalyst 2.3.

MSI 845PE Max2: Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz CPU(clocked at 19x133MHz for 2.53GHz clock speed and at 19x148MHz for 2.815GHz clock speed); 512MB Corsair XMS3200; ATI Radeon 9700 Pro, Broadcom 1GB onboard NIC; 40 GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD, Zalman 300w PSU. WindowsXP w/SP1, ATI Catalyst 2.3.

MSI KT4 Ultra: AMD AthlonXP 2400+ CPU (clocked at 15x133MHz for 2GHz clock speed and at 11.5x169MHz for 1.94GHz clock speed); 512MB Corsair XMS3200; ATI Radeon 9700 Pro; Broadcom 1Gb onboard NIC; 40 GB Maxtor ATA133 HDD, Zalman 300w PSU. Windows XP w/ SP1, ATi Catalyst 2.3.

Application Benchmarks

SiSoft Sandra is a great all-around performance benchmark when you need numbers immediately and have no time to stand around waiting for hours on WebMark 2001 to finish. We find it best to run a few "preliminary" tests with SiSoft Sandra to give us a way to gauge overall expectations.

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We see the Asus board putting us some very nice memory bandwidth numbers. The 200MHz FSB number breaking the 3000 mark is certainly a milestone on a AMD based board. Of course this could not have been accomplished unless the CPU's bus was available to be opened up as well.

Business Winstone measures a PC's overall performance by running today's top-selling Windows-based 32-bit applications. Latest release: Business Winstone 2001 version 1.0 (11/07/2000). The Business Winstone tests are "market-centered" tests. Business applications are the popular applications employed by most users every day. Their final list of ten business productivity applications includes: Five Microsoft Office 2000 applications (Access, Excel, FrontPage, PowerPoint, and Word); Microsoft Project 98; Lotus Notes R5; NicoMak WinZip; Norton AntiVirus; and Netscape Communicator.

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Again, the advantage of a higher FSB shows very clearly in this benchmark, as the ASUS outperforms all of the other boards. The ABIT AT7 board is right in the running though and remember that the CPU's FSB is at 133 compared to the 166MHz of the Asus board. So all in all, they are neck and neck. Also worth mentioning is that AMD tends to show much better in this test than Intel as per the record.

Content Creation Winstone 2002 is a system-level, application-based benchmark that measures a PC's overall performance when running top, Windows-based, 32-bit, content creation applications on Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, or Windows XP. Content Creation Winstone 2002 uses the following applications: Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1, Adobe Premiere 6.0, Macromedia Director 8.5, Macromedia Dreamweaver UltraDev 4, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.01.00.3055, Netscape Navigator 6/6.01, Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 5.0c (build 184).

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Here again, the power of the nForce2 and the dual-DDR controllers comes through, as the A7N8X takes the lead in this memory hungry benchmark. I see this as a big big win for an AMD system and the fact that DASP is actually working. For a 2GHz system to be putting up these content numbers, it is very impressive.

SysMark 2002 incorporates the following Internet Content Creation and Office Productivity applications:

Office Productivity: Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Outlook 2002, Microsoft Access 2002, Netscape Communicator® 6.0, Dragon NaturallySpeaking Preferred v.5, WinZip 8.0, and McAfee VirusScan 5.13.

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With the 166MHz FSB, the A7N8X scores exactly the same at the 845PE Max2, with a 500MHz CPU deficit. This is a very respectable result for the A7N8X. This is generally a category taken by Intel but the nForce2 has given new power to the AMD CPU, there is no doubt about it.

Internet Content Generation: Adobe Photoshop® 6.01, Adobe Premiere® 6.0, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 7.1, Macromedia Dreamweaver 4, and Macromedia Flash 5.

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The A7N8X runs far ahead of its peers again, and is closing the gap to less than 62 points between it and the 845PE Max2. Keep in mind that the Pentium 4's SSE2 instructions and the 500MHz difference in CPU speed give it an advantage, especially with the encoding portion of this benchmark.

(Editor's Note: I have been seeing some very odd results in the last couple of weeks using some of the newer mainboards and the Internet Content Creation portion of the BAPCO SysMark 2002. I am seeing some wildly varied scores, some up to 20%, so I am not very sure of the validity of the numbers not here on the whole. All in all, take these with a grain of salt at the moment till I figure out what is going on. Many thanks.)