X-bit labs

Love at First Touch: ATI Radeon Xpress 3200 Review (page 12)

Category: Chipsets

by Alexey Stepin , Anton Shilov

[ 03/27/2006 | 02:34 PM ]

Performance in Theoretical Tests

Futuremark PCMark05

The three platforms all have almost the same result, which is not surprising at all. After all, they differ in the mainboard model alone and are absolutely identical otherwise. The architectural features of the chipsets don’t play a big role here. To be exact, the nForce4 SLI X16 platform is ahead of the CrossFire Xpress 3200, but the gap of 39 points is within the measurement error range.

This test measures the CPU performance, so its results are similar on all the platforms, with a very small advantage on the part of the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 CrossFire Edition (RD480), because they all used one and the same AMD Athlon 62 X2 4800+ processor. The integrated memory controller of AMD’s processors has one positive effect – the performance of the processor doesn’t depend on the chipset which is in fact serves as a HyperTransport tunnel.

The memory subsystem test is somewhat surprisingly won by the CrossFire Xpress 3200 platform. The memory worked with the same timings on all the platforms, so we can only guess that a better BIOS, with optimizations for the most efficient operation of the Athlon 64 memory controller, is the explanation of this.

Futuremark 3DMark2001 SE

The nForce4 SLI X16 has the lowest result in this old version of 3DMark. The highest result is shown by the ATI RD480-based mainboard rather than by the newer RD580-based one. This test can hardly be called representative today as it doesn’t use any modern technologies and puts but a very low load on the graphics subsystem.