Testing Participants Features Comparative Chart

Summing up I would like to offer you a pretty big table very illustratively comparing the specifications of all our 13 testing participants:

Click to enlarge

Testbed and Methods

The major goal of our tests was to find out all the performance advantages of the reviewed products. Note that since the memory controller in Athlon 64 based systems is situated in the CPU, and hence its speed hardly depends on the mainboard, most our today’s testing participants would run very close to one another in most tasks. At the same time, however, there are other subsystems, which might affect the overall performance of our platforms. For example, the disk subsystem, or the graphics subsystem. Since these subsystems are implemented differently on various mainboards, the systems might also show different results in some benchmarks. Let’s check this out.

For our tests we used the following system:

• AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (2.0GHz) CPU;
• Mainboards: Albatron K8X800 Pro II, AOpen AK86-L, ASUS K8V Deluxe, BIOSTAR K8NHA Pro, BIOSTAR K8VHA Pro, Chaintech ZNF3-150, Gigabyte GA-K8N, Gigabyte GA-K8NNXP, Gigabyte GA-K8VT800, Leadtek K8N Pro, MSI K8T Neo, Shuttle AN50R, Soltek SL-K8AV2-RL;
• 512MB DDR400 SDRAM (2-2-2-6 timings);
• NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 Ultra graphics card (Detonator 52.16 driver);
• Western Digital WD400JB HDD.

The tests were run in Windows XP Professional SP1 operating system with the installed DirectX9.0b package. During the tests we used NVIDIA nForce3 Unified Driver 2.65 and VIA Hyperion 4in1 Driver v.4.49.

Also note that we had to give up the idea of using a hard disk drive subsystem with SerialATA HDDs, because some of the testing participants didn’t support SerialATA protocol.

During our tests we used the available BIOS versions at the time of the test session. The table below lists them all for your reference: