Asus A8N SLI Premium - NF4 SLI For AMD Refined

How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test systems for this review, we first entered the system BIOS and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults."  We then manually configured our system RAM to run at 200MHz (DDR400), with the timings set to CL 2,2,25 settings.  The hard drive was then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP2) was installed.  Then we installed all of the necessary drivers and removed Windows Messenger from the system altogether. Auto-Updating and System Restore were also disabled, and we set up a 768MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drive, and ran all of the tests. Our World Bench 5 tests were done on a completely clean install as the very first batch of tests we ran.

Test System Specifications AMD All Over

SYSTEM 1: Athlon 64 FX-53 (2.4GHz) Athlon 64 FX-57 (OC testing only) Asus A8N SLI Premium NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI 2x512MB Corsair PC3200 CL2,2,2,5 GeForce 6800 GT GeForce 6800 GT x2 - SLI Onboard Ethernet Onboard Audio WD "Raptor" 36GB HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 Forceware v77.72 nForce 4 Drivers v7.13 DirectX 9.0c

SYSTEM 2: Athlon 64 FX-53 (2.4GHz) MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI 2x512MB Corsair PC3200 CL2,2,2,5 GeForce 6800 GT GeForce 6800 GT x2 - SLI Onboard Ethernet Onboard Audio WD "Raptor" 36GB HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 Forceware v77.72 nForce 4 Drivers v7.13 DirectX 9.0c

SYSTEM 3: Athlon 64 FX-53 (2.4GHz) Asus A8N SLI Deluxe NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI 2x512MB Corsair PC3200 CL2,2,2,5 GeForce 6800 GT GeForce 6800 GT x2 - SLI Onboard Ethernet Onboard Audio WD "Raptor" 36GB HD 10,000 RPM SATA Windows XP Pro SP2 Forceware v77.72 nForce 4 Drivers v7.13 DirectX 9.0c

Preliminary Benchmarks with SiSoft SANDRA 2005 Synthetic Testing

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. SANDRA consists of a set of information and diagnostic utilities that can provide a host of useful information about your hardware and operating system. We ran three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2005 suite (CPU, Multimedia, and Memory).  All of these tests were run with our A64 FX-53 processor set to its default clock speed of 2.4GHz (12x200MHz). 

The A8N SLI Premium clocked in at just about where we expected for an Asus board, slightly aggressive on the stock CPU timings at 2.42GHz for our Athlon 64 FX-53 processor.  This board and CPU combo also shows characteristic strength as far as single core processors go, in both Integer and Floating point performance.  However, SANDRA's tests heavily favor the multi-threaded capabilities of the Pentium 4, so the reference system scores reflect that advantage.  In the "real world" those of you in the know most likely realize that these numbers don't directly correlate to actual application performance but rather are an indication of specific "Processor Optimized" performance.

The memory bandwidth scores on the other hand are pretty much straight forward raw throughput numbers that scale across architectures, memory and bus speeds.  Here the Athlon 64 FX-53 and the A8N SLI Premium, with standard DDR DRAM at 400MHz CL2 settings, put up memory scores competitive with DDR2 667MHz memory, thanks in part due to the Athlon 64's low latency on board memory controller.