X-bit labs

EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra Mainboard Review: Meet NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra Chipset! (page 13)

Category: Mainboards

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 01/12/2005 | 05:15 AM ]

You see that EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra is somewhat slower than the MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum in the tests, yet we can’t admit that nForce4 Ultra is a slower chipset than nForce3 Ultra – the BIOS of the EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra still requires some improvement and future BIOS updates may also improve the performance of this mainboard.

It is much more interesting to take a closer look at the results of EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra at the two frequencies of the clock generator: 200MHz and 300MHz. You can see that we get a small bonus (about 1-2%) by overclocking the generator, so this overclocking would only make sense if you want to overclock the CPU. Higher base frequency doesn’t bring any speed advantages since it requires a reduction of the HyperTransport frequency and a setting less efficient memory timings.