DFI NFII Ultra: Mean Green Dream Machine
by Wesley Fink on July 30, 2003 6:25 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
DFI NFII Ultra: Stress Testing
We performed stress tests on the DFI NFII Ultra in several different areas and configurations, including:
1. Chipset and motherboard stress testing, which was conducted by running the FSB at 223MHz; and,
2. Memory stress testing, which was conducted by running RAM at 400MHz in Dual Channel mode with two DIMM slots filled, and at 400MHz with all three DIMM slots filled at the lowest memory timings possible.
Front Side Bus Stress Test Results:
As standard practice, we ran a full range of stress tests and benchmarks to ensure the DFI NFII Ultra was absolutely stable at each overclocked FSB speed. These stress tests included Prime95 torture tests, which were run in the background for a total of 24 hours.In addition, we proceeded to run several other tasks, such as data compression, various DX8 and DX9 games, and apps like Word and Excel while Prime95 was running in the background. Finally, we ran our benchmark suite, which includes Sysmark 2002, Quake3 Arena, Unreal Tournament 2003, SPECviewperf 7.0, and Jedi Knight2. 223MHz FSB was the highest overclock we were able to achieve with the DFI NFII Ultra without encountering any reliability issues.
Memory Stress Test Results:
This memory stress test is very basic, as it simply tests the ability of the NFII Ultra to operate at its officially supported memory frequency (400MHz DDR) at the lowest supported memory timings that our Corsair TwinX LL modules support:| Stable Dual DDR400 Timings (2/3 banks populated) |
|
| Clock Speed: | 200MHz |
| Timing Mode: | N/A |
| CAS Latency: | 2.0 |
| Bank Interleave: | N/A |
| RAS to CAS Delay: | 2T |
| RAS Precharge: | 4T |
| Precharge Delay: | 2T |
| Command Rate: | N/A |
It’s not surprising to see the DFI NFII Ultra achieve such low memory timings – we often see 2-4-2-2 timings are possible with the better nForce2 boards. The nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset, like Corsair LL memory, seems to be designed to give the lowest possible memory timings. As we have seen in other reports of memory performance, this does not always translate into the fastest memory performance, but the lowest memory timings is a means of comparing motherboards. It is most useful when comparing boards based on the same chipset.
Filling all three available memory banks is more strenuous on the memory subsystem than testing two banks in dual channel mode, as it tests the rare occasion that a desktop user will install three DIMMs running 400MHz DDR at the most aggressive memory timings available in the BIOS:
| Stable Dual DDR400 Timings (3/3 banks populated) |
|
| Clock Speed: | 200MHz |
| Timing Mode: | N/A |
| CAS Latency: | 2.0 |
| Bank Interleave: | N/A |
| RAS to CAS Delay: | 2T |
| RAS Precharge: | 5T |
| Precharge Delay: | 2T |
| Command Rate: | N/A |
We were very pleased to see the fast timings that we achieved with all three DIMM banks filled on the NFII Ultra. Those who wish to use all three memory banks will not have to relax timings very much on this motherboard. We found 2-5-2-2 worked well with three banks filled, which is only slightly slower than the 2-4-2-2 timings that worked well with two DIMMs in dual-channel mode.
We tested all these memory timings using several stress tests and general applications to guarantee stability. We started the tests by running 24 hours of Prime95 torture tests. Prime95 ran successfully at the timings listed in the above charts. We also ran Sciencemark (memory tests only) and Super Pi. All of these stress tests ran on the DFI NFII Ultra without problems.
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Anonymous User - Friday, August 1, 2003 - link
This article is useless because it doesn't help anyone that is looking for a high-end board.
1.Readers want to see how it compares in games! Even though it is stated that different video cards are used, these numbers do not help anyone.
2.Readers want to see how it compares against other top of the line boards! (why not compare it against a P3, it would be just as usefull!)
3."Performance tests for the DFI NFII Ultra LanParty were run with the ATI 9800 PRO 128MB video card with AGP Aperture set to 32MB"
AGP Aperture set to 32MB??? Most people would set this to 128MB! Is there a compatibility problem that should of been stated?
This article should either be fixed or removed from AnandTech's website as it is damaging to their reputation.
If nothing is done about this article then it shows how much AnandTech listens to it's readers.
-no insult intended towards anyone-
Anonymous User - Friday, August 1, 2003 - link
This article is a bit low on quality. Visiting the forums I know there are tons of qualified guys/gals that would love, including myself, to write/work at anand. I can't believe that this new guy was the best thing they found. I agree with other comments posted. I also hate with a passion the new benchmark result that are used in some of the article, some were flash... I restrict what runs on my browser because I hate to see a woman f****** a cow when I browse. What happened to the plain jpeg/gif of the past? Would much prefer that since otherwise no point of reading the articleAnonymous User - Friday, August 1, 2003 - link
just wanted to respond to number 18, who quoted one of my comments.Actually man, I have been a NVIDIA fan and own several NVIDIA products. However as with most of us gamers you have to go where the speed, performance and quality is. I do own a 9700 pro and currently use it for my main gaming, but then again why not? does NVIDIA produce anything that compares?
NVIDIA has had their last 2 product lines fail, along with there cheats and shortcuts to produce good numbers. I seem to remember another company that did those things, can we say 3DFX? Who baught them???? NVIDIA.
my point was not that i am biased, but that ATI is currently the top of the line for speed, quality and performance, besides the fact it supports the new directx9.
which is better to do tests on after all, outdated and slow technology, or up to date top of the line technology?
Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
Jeez, why would anyone even bother writing articles for such ungrateful SOBsAnonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
I may have missed it, but how much is this thing gonna cost?justly - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
There is an explanation about the scores, at the bottom of the preformance test configuration page you can read this"Many benchmarks show widely different results with different video hardware, so we have indicated benchmarks run with the ATI Radeon 9800 PRO with an asterisk. Benchmarks without an asterisk were run with the nVidia Ti4600."
Iam glad to see the move to the ATi 9800 Pro, this eliminates any video bottleneck and allowes for 8X AGP compatibility testing.
Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
This article really needs fixin!First major complaint is the use of old graphics cards. Compare apples to apples. Not apples to oranges to peaches.
Second, the Asus A78NX was not tested either. This IS the gold standard with AMD enthusiasts. How can we make a good comparison?
Third, where are the game tests and 3D Mark scores?
Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
In response to #6(Wesley):I'm not saying your numbers are wrong, I'm saying your description seems wrong. As #21 points out, that description makes absolutely no sense, and as far as I've read, it's wrong. RAID 1.5 is a RAID 1 mirror with "optimized" reads; nothing more. Check Tom's Hardware, I believe they have a good article on this.
Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
Umm....Striping and mirroring with 2 drives only?OK...Let's look at this the way he explained it:
Take 2, 80 GB drives...
Half of each contains is striped, the other half used to mirror the stripe.
In what way is this useful? If 1 drive fails, you've lost the stripe AND the useless mirror...
Please explain to me why this is a good thing, Anandtech....
-Phil Green
LM Information Systems
Anonymous User - Thursday, July 31, 2003 - link
ok i wont comment the different video cards used, im sure you realise this isn't right... especially for the games benches.hopefully you'll make up, testing the other boards with this raddy too... also all tests that were done on just this board shall be done to the rest of the boards in time... when you fix all these things i hope you'll put up some notice on the main page.
i got a major complaint however... the idea to use flash for displaying the graphs isn't good at all. the newest flash plugins for mozilla are incredibly slow, and almost make my pc freeze as i open multiple tabs with your articles(with at least 2 flash adds on each page) so i prefer to disable my flash plugin. i know i dont represent the majority of your readers here, so i'm not important... but yet i think you should consider simple gifs for your graphs.
now another thing... why does the forum open in such a weird window? i mean, no addressbar and toolbar, etc. thats kinda annoying.
now a question about the test results... i find some specview results quite weird. in a couple if tests the dfi scores quite less than the rest, and then there's that test where dfi scores 5 times more than the rest.... i'd like to read your comment on these tests, hopefully you have some explanation.
bye folks, and forgive my bitching :) inspite it, i do like your site and thank you for the articles. you're doing a great job