Performance in Theoretical Tests

Futuremark PCMark05 build 110

The performance of the two platforms with different mainboards varies by no more than a few percent. Our using the correct BIOS settings and the new version of the nForce4 driver leads to the new ASUS mainboard getting a higher overall score than the older A8N-SLI Premium, although the difference of 61 points isn’t too big for the overall scores of about 4300 points.

The diagram shows that the CPU performance is absolutely the same on the A8N-SLI Premium and the A8N32-SLI Deluxe mainboards. The difference of 12 points is within the measurement error range. Of course, the lower clock rate of the HyperTransport bus between the chipset’s Bridges doesn’t have any effect on the CPU performance.

All modern processors from AMD come with an integrated memory controller, so the results of this test aren’t surprising at all. The ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe does somewhat better than the older mainboard, though, thanks to the new driver and the correct setting of the SB to NB Frequency option.

Futuremark 3DMark2001 SE build 330

The ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe is definitely worse than the A8N-SLI Premium in this test, scoring 508 points less, but the second test reduced the gap to 116 points only. This difference is already small, so we can consider the A8N32-SLI Deluxe and the A8N-SLI Premium as having the same performance in 3DMark2001 SE.

Futuremark 3DMark05 build 120

The newer version of Futuremark’s benchmark thinks the new mainboard is a little better when using the new chipset driver and the correctly set-up HT bus. When the SB to NB Frequency option is not manually corrected, the two mainboards have nearly the same results. The difference is anyway rather small because the computer speed is limited by the graphics subsystem performance in this test.

The A8N32-SLI Deluxe used to be slower in this test, but its performance improves with the correct HyperTransport frequency multiplier and the new nForce4 driver so it is now as fast as the A8N-SLI Premium and even faster. However, the advantage is not that significant, only 1%.

It seems the frequency of the HyperTransport bus between the chipset’s North and South Bridges doesn’t affect the results of this test at all, while the performance gain comes only from the improved chipset driver.

In the theoretical tests we installed only one graphics card into the PCI Express x16 slot connected to the North Bridge. There is also no active data exchange between the CPU and the disk subsystem which is typical rather of data compression applications. Let’s take a look at the WinRAR results then.