Testbed and Methods

First of all, a couple of words on the testing methods. Since our system is based on the uATX board with integrated graphics, it should represent a budget solution, i.e. a processor mustn’t be too fast and powerful. Thus, we decided in favor of the Athlon XP 1700+, because this is the very budget solution. Also, it’s useless to compare the integrated core with the GeForce4 Ti or RADEON 9500/9600, or even GeForce FX or RADEON 9700/9800 Pro cards, because the outcome is predictable. The best choice would be the GeForce4 MX420, as its core clock and memory bandwidth are close to those of nForce2 IGP. But at that time we didn’t have this card at our disposal, that is why we will compare our today’s hero with GeForce4 MX440 w/AGP 8x. We will also find out how greatly lower memory bandwidth and core clock may affect the performance of GeForce4 MX. Here is the final testbed configuration:

Note that we used Corsair memory, because we simply didn’t have any slower memory at hand. This is not an appeal to use such expensive memory in budget systems. But still, you should make sure that your nForce2 IGP based system has quality memory.

Now, a few words about the testing conditions. Since the graphics memory of the integrated core is a part of the system memory, it’s interesting to see how the system memory latency affects the performance in graphics applications. We also take into consideration that the memory working at 266MHz (PC2100) with aggressive timings is pretty inexpensive and widely spread, while far not all modules will work as PC2700 with the most aggressive timings.

The integrated graphics core was tested with the following memory settings: PC2100 with the 2-2-2-5 timings, PC2700 with 2.5-3-3-7 and PC2700 with the temporary 2-2-2-5 timings. When the system was tested with the external graphics card in games the PC2700 wasn’t used with the conservative timings as they had almost no effect on the overall performance.

We didn’t switch to high-quality graphics modes by forcing full-screen anti-aliasing and texture anisotropic filtering because it’s obvious that the integrated solution will perform not very fast there. We don’t recommend you to enable them either.

Performance

Office Applications

The first part of our tests will be Winstone business benchmarks. The idea is simple: nForce2 based platform can work as an office solution. And we measure the performance to find out how the graphics core can affect the memory subsystem performance. The speed will fall down at least because it takes time to distribute data between the processor and the graphics core.

Well, we were right asserting that the integrated core would lower the system performance in the office tasks. But the drop is not dramatic: in Business Winstone with the memory working as PC2100 the performance falls down by 2% at the most, which is not that noticeable. Note that when the memory is not synchronous to the FSB, the efficiency drops by over 3% in Business Winstone with the external card installed. It’s not much but it demonstrates that fast memory is not always a good thing.