Pentium 4 Chipset Showdown
Our Testing Method
PERFORMANCE
This is where the silicon
meets the benchmark. Intel almost always
maintained a performance edge over other
chipset vendors in the past, but nVidia just
squirts past Old Faithful on this one. We
won’t call it total annihilation, but when you
look at the benchmarks on the following
page it’s clear the nForce4 SLI IE holds
a razor-thin performance edge over the
955X. It might have even been a tie had
the 955X outrun the nForce4 SLI IE in
more than two tests, but the NF4 is clearly
a tad faster (for more results turn to page
18). WINNER: NFORCE4 SLI IENFORCE4 SLI IE: Asus
P5ND2-SLI Intel Edition,
$230, http://www.asus.comhead 2 head TWO TECHNOLOGIES ENTER, ONE TECHNOLOGY LEAVES
W
e opted to pit the 955X against the nForce4 SLI Intel
Edition using two boards from Asus. Representing Intel is
Asus’ P5WD2 Premium board. In the nVidia corner is the P5ND2-
SLI Deluxe. We used a common set of components for both: a
3.73GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition operating on the 1066MHz
front-side bus, 1GB of Crucial Ballistix DDR2/667, a 160GBSeagate Barracuda SATA drive, and an MSI GeForce 7800 GTX
card. We manually locked down the bus speeds, memory clocks,
and videocard clocks so they were as similar as possible. We
then installed a clean copy of Windows XP Pro with SP2 on each
machine. We selected benchmarks that would tap the chipset
and RAM subsystems more than the videocard.AVAILABILITY
We define availability
as the ability to
buy the damned
hardware. We
checked with
motherboard
vendors and found
that the major
sellers either offer or
plan to offer boards
with both the 955X
and nForce4 SLI IE
chipsets. We then
checked online
retailers and found
there were fewer
than 10 boards
available using either
chipset. Because
both chipsets are
relatively new,
it’ll probably take
another few months
for the offerings to
increase, but we’re
not impressed.
WINNER:
NEITHERround^3
DUAL-VIDEOCARD SUPPORT
You don’t want a motherboard
that’s incapable of supporting two PCI-E graphics
cards. Today, dual-videocard support is really all
about nVidia’s SLI, which lets you aggregate two
videocards to increase 3D performance in some
games, and which is currently off-limits to any Intel
chipset. Certain Intel boards, such as the Asus
P5WD2 featured here, offer two full length PCI-E
slots to “support two graphics cards for more than
two monitors,” but even though Asus includes
an SLI cable, and two nVidia boards will work in
the system, they simply won’t take advantage of
SLI. We strongly believe that ATI will offer its dual-
videocard CrossFire technology on the 955X, but
for now this category goes to the tried-and-true
nForce4 SLI IE. WINNER: NFORCE 4 SLI IEround^4 round 5
OCTOBER 2005 MA XIMUMPC 17
Continued on page 18 Ë