Performance in WinRAR 3.51

The system bus (its role is played by HyperTransport on the AMD64 platform) is loaded heavily at data compression tasks, so the A8N32-SLI Deluxe quite naturally falls behind the A8N-SLI Premium if the SB to NB Frequency option is set at 2X. The gap isn’t too big, not amounting to 10% even, but that’s a fact that the low HyperTransport bandwidth between the CPU and chipset negatively affects the performance of the nForce4 SLI X16. Setting the correct multiplier improves the performance of the A8N32-SLI Deluxe at data archiving, but it still lags behind the A8N-SLI Premium. This seems to be the consequence of the longer path the data has to take in the nForce 16X as it goes from the HDD to the CPU and back again.

Performance in PCI Express Test

The point of this test is in sending a certain amount of data from the system memory to the graphics memory and back again, the size of the transferred block varying from 64KB to 4MB. The utility loads the memory controller as well as the graphics bus and the bus that connects the CPU and the chipset (in this case, this is the HyperTransport link). Here are the results the test produced on the ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe platform with the correct BIOS settings and the version 6.85 chipset driver:

When the data block size is small, the two mainboards differ by less than 10MB/s, but when it comes to 256MB blocks the A8N32-SLI Deluxe takes the lead and enjoys a 40MB/s advantage over the A8N-SLI Premium. The older mainboard overtakes the newer one later due to its simpler architecture and, accordingly, a lower latency when transferring data between the various components of the system.

The results are quite different when the data are being transferred from the graphics card memory into the system RAM. The mainboards have similar speeds, except on the largest data blocks where the A8N-SLI Premium is on top again.

So, we can’t say the nForce4 SLI X16 has any advantage over the ordinary nForce4 SLI basing on the results of the theoretical tests. On the other hand, the architectural features of the nForce4 SLI X16 just can’t show up if you use only one graphics card. The new chipset is meant to ensure the maximum performance of a SLI configuration with two graphics cards installed. We are going to see if it is so in real-life games in the next section of the review.