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- Date:
- Tuesday , April 05, 2005
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI Intel Edition
NVIDIA today officially enters a new market. They will now be going head to head with Intel, building motherboard chipsets for Intel processors. NVIDIA comes out swinging firmly at the high end with an SLI chipset that looks to be very strong.
Since NVIDIA is marketing this as a "high end" setup, we thought we would start out with SLI testing and answer some questions that many of you are going to have on the AMD SLI Vs. Intel SLI front.
We followed our normal Video Card Evaluation format as we show what are the best playable settings on each system show.
BEFORE YOU COMPLAIN!!! We used an Intel Prescott 3.6GHz Pentium 4 for testing against the stronger AMD FX-55. This was a complete oversight on my part. I installed the wrong processor before I delivered the system to Brent for SLI evaluation and I then went out of town. I had wanted to use the supplied 3.73 Pentium 4 Extreme Edition for SLI evaluation, but this simply did not happen due to time constraints and my error in installing the wrong CPU.
That all said, we still think that we show you some very valid evaluations in what SLI on the Intel system can offer you.
We do use a 3.73GHz Pentium 4 for the comparisons following the SLI evaluations.
SLI Systems Test Setup:
CPU | AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 |
Motherboard | ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe (nForce4) |
System Memory | 2 x 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200LLPro |
Hard Drive | Western Digital 74GB Raptor SATA/150 |
OS | Windows XP Pro SP2 with DirectX 9.0c |
CPU | Intel Pentium 4 3.6E |
Motherboard | NVIDIA nForce4 (Intel Platform) |
System Memory | 2x 512MB Corsair XMS DDR2 |
Hard Drive | Western Digital 74GB Raptor SATA/150 |
OS | Windows XP Pro SP2 with DirectX 9.0c |
For our system platform setup, we pit the NVIDIA nForce4 Intel Platform directly up against our nForce4 AMD FX-55 platform for our gaming tests.
SLI Video Card Setups:
Make & Model | Platform | Core Clock (MHz) | Memory Clock (MHz) | Driver Version | Notes |
FX-55 - 2x NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra SLI | PCIe | 400 | 1100 | ForceWare 71.84 | WHQL Drivers |
NF4 Intel - 2x GeForce 6800 GT SLI Overclocked to Ultra Speeds | PCIe | 400 | 1100 | ForceWare 71.84 | WHQL Drivers |
The video cards included in our Intel NVIDIA SLI system were two GeForce 6800 GT video cards. We overclocked them to 400MHz / 1.1GHz to represent two 6800 Ultras in SLI.
Game Evaluation Setup
For our gaming performance tests we used our usual “Highest Playable Settings” method. We concentrated on examining the real-world gameplay that each platform provides. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. We did include a few “Apples to Apples” timedemo tests in a few of the game tests.