Intel Motherboards: Something Wicked This Way Comes...

General Performance & Encoding

The MSI P4N Diamond and Gigabyte 8N SLI Quad Royal perform very similarly with each other in the benchmarks, while the Abit NI8 trails in the business application benchmarks and the Gigabyte GA-8I955x Royal offers performance in the middle to lower end on an overall basis. It is still noteworthy that the nForce4 SLI Intel Edition chipset "consistently" scores near or better than the Intel 955x in office application areas where historically Intel has been on top.

We included scores of the Gigabyte GV-3D1-68GT in the 3DMark tests to give an indication of how well this unique single slot SLI capable card performs. We will be including additional benchmarks along with testing the new 81.84 driver set to see how well a mid-range card and entry level dual core system perform against higher end solutions.