Testbed and Methods

We will end this review of EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra mainboard and NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra chipset by offering you the results of our traditional performance tests. Since there are yet no other chipsets for Athlon 64 that would support the PCI Express bus, we have to compare the speed of EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra against that of a mainboard (8N Neo2 Platinum from MSI) based on the previous model of the chipset, the nForce3 Ultra. In order to ensure fair and correct comparison, we use two analogous RADEON X800 XT graphics cards with AGP 8x and PCI Express x16 interfaces. Otherwise, the test platforms were identical.

So, we used the following hardware in our tests:

• AMD Athlon 64 3800+ CPU (2.4GHz, 512KB L2 cache);
• Mainboards:
  • EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra (NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra);
  • MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum (NVIDIA nForce3 Ultra);
• 1024MB DDR400 SDRAM (Corsair CMX512-3200XLPRO, 2x512MB, 2-2-2-10).
• Graphics cards:
  • PowerColor RADEON X800 XT (AGP 8x, 500MHz/500MHz);
  • PowerColor RADEON X800 XT (PCI Express x16, 500MHz/500MHz).
• Maxtor MaXLine III 250GB hard disk drive (Serial ATA-150).

We performed our tests in Windows XP SP2 operating system.

Since EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra allows increasing the frequency of the clock generator to 300MHz, we decided to add the performance results after overclocking, too. So, we tested this mainboard two times:

1. With the CPU working in its default mode (12x200MHz=2.4GHz)
2. When the frequency of the clock generator is increased (8x300MHz=2.4GHz).

Thus we will see if overclocking the clock generator is beneficial at all.

In the 8x300MHz mode the frequency of the HyperTransport bus was 900MHz (3x300MHz), and the memory was clocked at 600MHz (2.4GHz / 8). The memory timings were set to 2.5-4-4-8. By the way, among the memory modules we had at hand during our tests, only Corsair CMX512-4400C25PT could work that fast (as DDR600 SDRAM).

The CPU-Z screenshots below show you the parameters of the CPU at overclocking: