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Untitled Document
The Test System
All of these tests were run with a Gigabyte K8NS Pro, equipped with an nForce
3 250 chipset and an AMD Athlon 3200+ (1MB) using 2 x 512MB of KingMax @ 2.5-4-4-8.
Although UT2004 was always run in software rendering mode, other benchmarks
such as Far Cry, 3DMark and Aquamark where run using a Sapphire 9800XT 256MB.
HyperTransport Speed
The current generation of CPUs use 800MHz 16-Bit HyperTransport as standard,
but how crucial is the HyperTransport speed to overall system performance? UT2004
in software rendering mode was chosen for the test, because it offers consistent
results and is a real workout for the system, without being limited by GPU performance.
UT2004
| HT Speed |
1024 x 768 |
1280 x 1024 |
1200 x 1600 |
Difference |
| 200 MHz |
24.65 |
17.54 |
13.21 |
-1.3% |
| 400 MHz |
24.85 |
17.64 |
13.30 |
-0.6% |
| 600 MHz |
24.85 |
17.64 |
13.31 |
-0.6% |
| 800 MHz |
24.85 |
17.82 |
13.41 |
0.0% (Base) |
| 1000 MHz |
23.74 |
16.96 |
12.86 |
-4.5% |
Aquamark
| HT Speed |
Default Settings |
Difference |
| 200 MHz |
43,636 |
-5.7% |
| 400 MHz |
46,003 |
-0.5% |
| 600 MHz |
46,284 |
+0.1% |
| 800 MHz |
46,258 |
0.0% (Base) |
| 1000 MHz |
45,775 |
-1.0% |
As the figures show, we are seeing only the smallest performance differences
as the HyperTransport is slowed down. This means that the lower Hypertransport
speed of the nForce 150 is not really any reason to reject it immediately. More
puzzling is the fact that overclocking the HT speed has resulted in a lower
score. We can only conclude that since neither the board nor CPU are designed
for the higher speed so perhaps corruption is occurring but not badly enough
to crash the system. It may well be a timing issue.
It has been suggested that the HyperTransport link offers far more bandwidth
than the system could possibly use, unless the AGP, PCI, SATA and Ethernet interfaces
are all transmitting data as fast as they can. The standard implementation of
HyperTransport gives 6.4 GB/s, and the AGP slot can only manage 2.1 GB/s of
data transfer, so it would seem that for gaming and everyday use, the HyperTransport
bus has more bandwidth than it could ever need.
Thus, the 1GHz HyperTransport offered by the K8T800 Pro will only be of use
once CPUs that support it are available and there is some doubt as to whether
there will ever be any available for socket 754.
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