NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400Gb MCP Preview

Former staff writer - February 26, 2004

Benchmarks
Most of this review is to show what NVIDIA has brought to the table in terms of feature set, but what good is a feature set if performance is not up to par. So we used a few benchmarks and demos to see how the new nForce2 400GB stacks up to a know performer the Abit NF7-S based of the nForce2 ultra400 chipset. I know most of you are accustomed to seeing more benchmarks but this being a reference board we wanted to look at the feature set and will do a more detailed benchmark suite when we receive retail boards.

Testing Platform

Abit NF7-S & NVIDIA nForce2 Ultra 400Gb Reference Board

1GB PMI Turbo Memory CAS2 3-3-11

ATI Radeon 9800 Pro CAT 4.4

Maxtor 80GB 7200RPM SATA drive

SiSoft Sandra Memory Test
We will start the benchmarks off with the very popular SiSoft Sandra Memory test. The results were very impressive because the nForce2 400Gb showed a impressive increase in both Integer (ALU) and float (FPU) over the NF7-S.

SiSoft Sandra Memory Test

- Integer (ALU)

- Float (FPU)

nForce Ultra 400Gb

3015

2838

nForce2 MCP-T

2873

2707

MadOnion 3DMark 2001
3Dmark2001 is a very popular benchmark and is very sensitive to overall system speed. Again we see increase compared to the nf7-S. The extra memory bandwidth helped the NF@ 400Gb squeak by the NF7-S