Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe Wireless Edition
Performance Anywhere You Want It

By, Tom Laverriere
February 5, 2004

Test Setup A Well Oiled Machine

Here is a look at our setup.

Motherboard:

Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe Wireless Edition (BIOS 1007)

Common Hardware and Software:

AMD 2500+ Athlon XP Barton Processor 333MHz FSB

2 x 256MB Kingston HyperX PC3500 Memory

AOpen Aeolus FX5600S 256MB (Drivers - v.53.03 WHQL)

Seagate 40GB ATA-100 7200RPM Hard Drive

On board sound

WinXP Professional w/ SP1

DirectX 9.0b

NVIDIA Unified Driver Package v3.13
 

SiSoft Sandra and Overclocking Tests Simple performance metrics

Overclocking Experience:

Using our unlocked Athlon XP 2500+ processor we decided to lower the multiplier (11x) and run that front side bus higher than the default 166MHz setting.  To get as much out of the RAM and push the processor as high as we could, we settled in on a multiplier of 10.5x.  With this multiplier we were able to hit a front side bus speed of 216MHz giving us an effective 2268MHz CPU.  We ended on these settings for a couple of reasons.  First of all we are using PC3500 sticks of RAM so we were able to keep the memory speed synchronous with the front side bus, without having to lower the timings of the RAM.  Secondly, with an even lower multiplier than 10.5x we weren't able to raise the front side bus much before we had to start backing off on the memory timings to keep the system stable.  To achieve these settings we raised the CPU voltage to 1.80V and the DDR voltage to 2.7V.  The timings on the memory were kept at 2-3-3-6 giving us an aggressive setting. To put things further into perspective, the default setting of a 2500+ Barton processor is 11x166MHz yielding 1826Mhz.  Our speed of 2268MHz (10.5x216MHz) is a solid 442MHz or 24% increase over default performance.  Keep in mind this is using an open air environment with the fan speed at its highest setting.  All benchmarks, as well as the system in general, remained stable with these settings.   Let's take a look at some scores.

Test Settings:

For testing the Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard at default settings we used a multiplier of 9x and a front side bus of 200MHz.  We did this in order to fully utilize the nForce2 Ultra's system bandwidth, since it supports 400MHz front side bus speeds by default.  We also did this because a multiplier of 9x and a front side bus of 200MHz yields 1800MHz CPU speed which is very close to an Athlon XP 2500+ Barton (11x166MHz = 1826MHz) at default settings.  Here are the scores.

Sandra Testing: Default Settings DDR400
 

Our memory clock was set to a 1:1 ratio since we're using PC3500 rated memory modules.  The timings were set aggressively to 6-3-3-2 since this memory is capable of higher speeds.  The memory score of 2917 MB/s for an Athlon XP based system is very impressive.

Sandra Testing: Overclocked DDR432

The overclocked CPU Sandra scores come in at 8610 MIPS compared to a score of 6835 MIPS at default settings.  Most impressive is the 3323 MB/s score we achieved with the memory.  This overclocked setting is giving us an impressive 14% gain in performance compared to default settings.  Next up in the benchmarking queue we have the latest from the Winstone family.  Let's have a look. 

ZD eTesting Labs Business and Content Creation Winstones Desktop Application Performance

The Business Winstone 2004 tests include:

• Microsoft Access 2002 SP-2

• Microsoft Excel 2002 SP-2

• Microsoft FrontPage 2002 SP-2

• Microsoft Outlook 2002 SP-2

• Microsoft PowerPoint 2002 SP-2

• Microsoft Project 2002 SP-2

• Microsoft Word 2002 SP-2

• WinZip 8.1 SR-1

• Norton Antivirus Professional Edition 2003

The latest edition of the Business Winstone test shows the system bandwidth of the nForce2 Ultra chipset with DDR400 in a synchronous setting.  Even though we managed a 24% overclock of the CPU as mentioned earlier, the overclocked settings in this test only managed to squeeze out a 9% gain over default settings.  Of course 9% is nothing sneeze at, but at the same time, this type of performance boost will most likely go unnoticed by the end user.  When comparing the two motherboards in this benchmark, versus our reference DFI based nForce 2 scores,  they are neck and neck.

Content Creation Winstone 2004 tests include:

• Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1
• Adobe Premiere 6.50
• Macromedia Director MX 9.0
• Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 6.1
• Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980
• NewTek's LightWave 3D 7.5b
• Steinberg WaveLab 4.0f

The story continues with Content Creation Winstone 2004 as both boards remain neck and neck.  The DFI board manages to pull ahead at both default and overclocked settings, but by a very small margin.  This time we were able to squeeze out a 15% increase at the overclocked settings.  This is a fairly noticeable jump in performance and at this point we're squeezing out every last bit of system bandwidth available.  Moving on, we're going to put the Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe through a couple more system bandwidth benchmarks.  Let's take a look.

PC Mark and Workstation Scores