The Chaintech VNF4 Ultra : nForce 4 Ultra on a budget

CPU Testing

I decided to break my benchmarking down into three catagories, CPU Tests, Memory Tests, and finally, Graphics Tests. Since this is the first nForce 4 board i have had the opportunity to review there really isn’t much comparison, I ran all benchmarks at the stock setting of 200FSB, then again at the max FSB at the CPU’s default multiplier. For those of you wanting to get an idea of how this board stacks up against other, please check out some of my other board reviews here.

My system for testing the Chaintech VNF4 Ultra:

• AMD 3500+ Winchester with stock AMD CPU Cooler
• Corsair XMS 4400C25PT (2-2-2-7-1T @200FSB, 2.5-3-3-7-1T @225FSB)
• OCZ 520W PowerStream
• XFX 6600GT PCI-E video card
• Hitachi 80GB Deskstar SATA HDD

3DMark05 CPU Test

3DMark05 is a premium benchmark for evaluating the latest generation of gaming hardware. It is the first benchmark to require a DirectX9.0 compliant hardware with support for Pixel Shaders 2.0 or higher. Resolution was set to 1024×768.

3DMark03 CPU Test

The 3DMark03 CPU test is a convenient way to measure the performance of the CPU for typical 3D usage. The feature tests isolate the performance of key 3D features primarily relating to shader technologies.

PCMark04 CPU Test

PCMark04 supports the complete benchmark cycle ? allowing
you to benchmark your PC, view the resulting benchmark details, compare your results to those of others, and
finally analyze how to improve your PC performance. PCMark04?s system score is a single, globally recognized number that represents the overall PC performance
for home usage.

Sisoft Sandra 2005 CPU Arithmetic (ALU)

SiSoft Sandra 2005 is a synthetic benchmark for testing primary components.
The tests can stress a system’s CPU, Memory, or Multimedia capabilities.
Sandra 2005 supports X86 (32-bit) and X86-64 (64-bit) hardware and OS’s.

AquaMark3 CPU Test

AquaMark3 executes a complete state-of-the-art game engine and generates 3D scenes designed to make the same demands on hardware as a modern game. The utilized game engine, the krass? Engine, has been used in Aquanox and AquaNox 2: Revelation as well as in the upcoming RTS Spellforce by Phenomic Game Development. It is accepted industrywide and well-known to deliver high-performance graphic effects with superior quality.

Technically, AquaMark3 utilizes recent hardware features of the new DirectX 9 API, such as PixelShader 2.0, while staying fully backward compatible to DirectX 8 and 7 graphics hardware. The graphics and game engine features activated can be configured in fine detail to allow the performance measurement to be adjusted appropriately for the target system.