Intel Motherboards: Something Wicked This Way Comes...

Test Setup

The revised nForce4 SLI Intel Edition chipset now fully supports the dual core Pentium D processors in both stock and overclocked conditions. There were no issues with this board recognizing the two cores and four logical processors that are created with the Hyperthreading feature on this EE processor during testing. However, dual core really makes a difference in certain multi-tasking scenarios, as was demonstrated in the dual core performance preview. If you are interested in how the various chipsets perform in a real world multitasking setup, please take another look at that review.

The board's memory was operated at 3-2-2-8-1T for the benchmarking suites (matching the Abit NI8 settings), but the variations in the benchmarks against 3-3-3-8-1T (test settings on previous boards) were very minimal, so those numbers will not be published. The difference in performance results between the Patriot Extreme Performance PEP21G5600+XBL used on previous tests and the Corsair CM2X512A-5400UL at the same settings was negligible, so we tested with the certified Corsair memory as requested by Gigabyte. We will standardize on DDR-2 667 settings going forward and any previous test results used in comparisons will be revised. We also found that certain benchmarks scored better without Hyper Threading enabled, but in fairness, we felt it was best to show consistent scores with this feature enabled as it is the main selling point of this processor model.

Performance Test Configuration
Processor(s):	Intel Pentium EE 840 (3.2GHz, 800FSB, Dual-Core, HT enabled, 2x1MB L2) utilized for all tests Intel Pentium 820 (2.8GHz) for dual core verification
RAM:	2 x 512MB Corsair CM2X512A-5400UL revision 1.3 Settings- DDR2-667 as noted or DDR2-533 at (CL3-3-3-8-1T)
Hard Drive(s):	2 x Maxtor MaXLine III 7L300S0 300GB 7200 RPM SATA (16MB Buffer), 1 x Maxtor MaXLine III 7L300R0 300GB 7200 RPM IDE (16MB Buffer)
System Platform Drivers:	NVIDIA nForce4 SLI Intel Edition 7.13
Video Cards:	1 x XFX 7800GTX OC (PCI Express) for all tests 2 x MSI 7800GTX (PCI Express) for SLI Verification 2 x Gigabyte 6600 GT (PCI Express) for Multiple Monitor Verification
Video Drivers:	NVIDIA nForce 78.01 for all tests, 81.84 for special results tests
Operating System(s):	Windows XP Professional SP2
Motherboards:	Gigabyte GA-8I955X Royal MSI P4N Diamond Abit NI8 SLI Gigabyte 8N SLI Quad Royal