DirectX 9 Gaming Performance
DirectX 9 games do seem to benefit more from the increased memory speeds available on the Asus P5DW2 Premium and P5ND2-SLI Premium. All of the DirectX 9 games are faster at DDR2-667 and DDR2-800. A typical pattern is seen in UT2004 where the performance increase from 925X/533 to DDR2-800 is 5% to 6%. This is the pattern seen in all the gaming benchmarks, with the 925x boards at DDR2-533 at the bottom of the graphs and 955x/nF4 Intel at DDR2-667/DDR2-800 providing the best performance. The 955x and nForce4-SLI Intel are neck-and-neck in gaming performance at the higher speeds with no clear advantage to either chipset at these speeds.
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fitten - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
#5 Differences of 3% are usually in the noise of the type tests that most benchmark sites run. 3% is effectively 0% since that is beneath the precision of the tests.Calin - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
Higher speed memory will only give you a real performance boost if you use one of the fastest processors. On a slower processor, all that extra memory bandwidth will not help at all (or very little)Carfax - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
I wonder, is Intel ever going to introduce processors with a FSB greater than 1066 before they go to CSI? All this DDR2 bandwidth is going to waste..Darth Farter - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
what is the msrp for these boards, cause that $255/$248 prices on newegg/ZZF are hard to ignore...Pjotr - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
"i thought hypertransport was an amd thing, not an intel or nforce thing....."nVidia uses HyperTransport between NB and SB. They have since nForce1 on AMD and they also use it in X-Box, if you didn't know.
Wesley Fink - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
#5 - We didn't measure the difference in nF4 Intel and nF4 AMD at 2T. It was a subjective comment. So I have tried to better explain what I found in the paragraph you quote:"On the nF4 Intel platform, the performance impact of a 2T Command Rate appears to be rather small, as the nF4 Intel performance remains very competetive with the 955x as far as it goes. However, at just over DDR2-900, the nF4 Intel appears to hit a wall . . ."
Zebo - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
"it would have been better to include a fx-55 as competition "Not for INTC;)
Man that's a nice chipset they got though so missed from nV:)
Wesley Fink - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
overclockingoodness -Both boards are rated at DDR2-667, but both easily ran DDR2-800 with the right memory, which is the next logical memory speed. We mainly wanted to see if DDR2-800 made any real performance difference, and the answer is no in Office and Multimedia, and yes in most gaming. For the future this also gives us a full set of benchmarks at DDR2-800 for comparison if we choose to use them.
We also found the Asus 955X did a marginal DDR2-1066 in early testing so it seemed reasonable to at least test and report benchmarks at the very stable DDR2-800 in addition to DDR2-667. We won't be doing this with all future boards, but the tests did provide some answers to our questions.
mrwxyz - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
i thought hypertransport was an amd thing, not an intel or nforce thing.....Lonyo - Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - link
On page 5 you mention 2T having less of an impact than with AMD boards.Does that mean it has absolutely zero impact then?
There's a thread on the forums showing 2T for AMD haveing REAL WORLD impacts of maybe 3% slowdown, nothing more except in synthetic tests, so I suppose on the Intel board it makes maybe 1% difference.