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MadOnion's PCMark2002Pro:
When it came to hard drive performance, the MSI Ultra was the leader by a large margin. We don't normally run hard drive scores while overclocked since they are usually unaffected, but with such a new product, we didn't know what to expect, so we gave it a try..  What we found was that DualDDR had a major effect on the hard drive performance at stock speeds. Running at 128-Bit, the hard drive performance jumped 11 points over the 64-Bit test. When we overclocked the system, the 128-Bit score actually came in lower than the 64-Bit by 12 points. Keep in mind that these scores are very close and well within margin of error for the program. What we can say is that DualDDR does have an effect on hard drive performance, but it wasn't anything to get excited about. What was exciting to see was how the score improved when overclocking. Next we'll take a gander at some gaming performance.
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| | | Benchmarks and Comparisons | | OpenGL & DirectX | | Direct X with MadOnion's 3DMark2001SE: The next test we ran was the ever popular DirectX benchmark, 3DMark2001SE (Build 330). We ran the benchmark at the default settings to show how the system performed with DirectX applications. Then we ran the test again with the same variations we did in the previous test, utilizing both 64-Bit (Bank 1,2) and 128-Bit (Bank 1,3) memory modes. At the default clock speed, the system churned out a healthy 3DMark score, but not quite enough to beat the MSI board when running 64-Bit DDR. Once we enabled DualDDR, the system came within 2 points of tying the KT4. What was impressive was the jump in score when we increased the system bus. While overclocked, the system topped 13000 points at 64-Bit and added an additional 83 points with DualDDR enabled. If one thing can be said with the nForce2, if you have a decent video card in place, gaming is going to be good.
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| Benchmarks
and Comparisons Continued |
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Content Creation 2002 |
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Content Creation Winstone 2002:
When it comes to multimedia application benchmarking, we think Content Creation Winstone 2002 is well suited for the job. This program uses a series of popular multimedia based application to assess a system's abilities and issues a score. Below is a list of applications that Content Creation Winstone uses to come up with its rating.
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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) |
When compared to the MSI with the VIA KT400 Chipset, the nForce2 board held a narrow lead of just .8 points. When we enabled the DualDDR, we were surprised to see that the score actually dropped 1.3 points. It is possible that the programs used in this test are not designed to take advantage of the additional bandwidth, but until the bugs are ironed out with Content Creation 2003, this is what we have to work with.
Next we'll give Business Winstone 2002 a try and see if it can do any better.
More Winstones and Conclusion
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