Gigabyte 7NNXP (nForce2 Ultra 400): Gigabyte Goes nForce
by Evan Lieb on July 5, 2003 10:53 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Gigabyte 7NNXP: Stress Testing
We performed stress tests on the 7NNXP in several different areas and configurations, including:
1. Chipset and motherboard stress testing was conducted by running the FSB at 222MHz
2. Memory stress testing was conducted by running RAM at 400MHz with two DIMM slots filled and at 400MHz with all four DIMM slots filled in dual DDR mode at the lowest timings possible.
Front Side Bus Stress Test Results:
As standard practice, we ran a large load of stress tests and benchmarks to ensure the 7NNXP 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.
We proceeded to run several other tasks, such as data compression, various DX8 games, and light apps like Word and Excel with Prime95 running in the background. Finally, we reran our entire benchmark suite, which includes Sysmark 2002, Quake3 Arena, Unreal Tournament 2003, SPECviewperf 7.0, Jedi Knight 2 and XMPEG. In the end, 222MHz FSB was the highest overclock we were able to achieve with the 7NNXP without encountering any reliability issues.
Memory Stress Test Results:
This memory stress test examines the motherboard’s ability to operate at its officially supported memory frequency (400MHz DDR), and at the lowest supported memory timings that our Corsair TwinX LL modules support:
| Stable Dual DDR400 Timings (2/4 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 that the 7NNXP achieved such low memory timings with just two memory modules spec’ed at DDR400 running in dual channel DDR400 mode. It is standard for any P4 or Athlon XP motherboard to achieve these aggressive performance settings, though only nForce2 and nForce2 Ultra 400 motherboards can achieve a RAS Precharge as low as 4T. However, we suggest you run your memory at CAS 2-2-2-5 instead, as we discovered some time ago that CAS 2-2-2-4 is a bit slower than CAS 2-2-2-5. Of course, the difference will never be noticeable in real world usage.
The following memory stress test is obviously a bit more strenuous on the memory subsystem than most memory stress tests, as it tests for stability when a desktop user installs four DIMMs running in dual DDR400 mode at the most aggressive memory timings attainable in the BIOS:
| Stable Dual DDR400 Timings (4/4 banks populated) |
|
| Clock Speed: | 200MHz |
| Timing Mode: | N/A |
| CAS Latency: | 2.0 |
| Bank Interleave: | N/A |
| RAS to CAS Delay: | 3T |
| RAS Precharge: | 6T |
| Precharge Delay: | 2T |
| Command Rate: | N/A |
It is not unusual to see such lax timings for such a strenuous memory subsystem test such as this. However, we have seen better and so in this case, the 7NNXP does not perform as well as most other modern-day motherboards. Again, the real world performance difference is negligible, so we urge you not to flip out ove small variances in memory timings as seen in the two charts above.
We tested all these memory timings using several stress tests and general applications to guarantee stability. We initiated the tests by running Prime95 torture tests; a grand total of 24 hours of Prime95 was successfully run at the timings listed in the above charts. We also ran Sciencemark (memory tests only) and Super Pi. All three stress tests could not make the 7NNXP fail at the timings listed in the above charts.
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Anonymous User - Friday, July 11, 2003 - link
Is it really important ....Anonymous User - Friday, July 11, 2003 - link
Please Go back to The OLD way of doing reviews,without any flash!
Even better Make Charts with the numbers instead
of these unnecessary Printer head killers.
:(
Anonymous User - Thursday, July 10, 2003 - link
Regardless of the size of Flash itself, it would seem many users prefer not to use it because of Flash advertisements.For Christ's sake, it's not like GIFs are huge, and this is just annoying.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, July 9, 2003 - link
I filter all Flash/Shockwave content because of all those annoying overlay ads out there. Please revert back to something that is standards-based like plain HTML or GIF/JPG.Thanks.
Anonymous User - Wednesday, July 9, 2003 - link
The ITE chips support ATAPI devices I read, has this been tested?Anonymous User - Wednesday, July 9, 2003 - link
The board is a non-runner in my competition sinceit does NOT have HSF mounting holes! I seems as if
Gigabyte has overlooked the NEED for these holes
to save time/money on the engineering/production costs, and consquently will suffer poor sales of this part. The socket is arranged in an orientation that would preclude this part being used in a machine that will be transported any
distance with a most of the effective HSFs on the
market today. The socket arrangement should have the mounting lugs facing top to bottom to provide
against the sag of the HSF combination. Installing
the socket as they have, will result in the need for shimming (hate those things), and even then,
the mechanical stresses will be the achilles heel
of many many installations.
Sorry for the long-winded, but I have developed
this opinion through extensive use and study of the socket A specified hardware.
As for the fellow whom was looking for "any-time"
support contacts for Giga-byte? Hah!! It doesn't exist. Any inquiry I have made to thier support site seems to "get lost" for an always indeterminate time, occasionaly permantly.
It's a good thing that Giga-byte generally does
an excellent job producing thier products, (I own
20 of thier boards so-far) because if the support
side of thier business governed thier corporate
health, they would have folded by now.
Anonymous User - Tuesday, July 8, 2003 - link
The size of the Flash download is irrelevant. I don't know about the others, but I choose not to install such dreadful programs because other websites use them for extremely irritating advertisements. It's been a while since I did HTML, but is there a way that you could have the page test for Flash and then display a GIF if no flash is available? Heck, just the numbers in plain text would be fine with me if you don't want to make Flash and GIF charts. Just no loathsome Flash forced on us.Zuni - Tuesday, July 8, 2003 - link
Correction its 400k, which on a 56k modem takes a minute.http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/downl...
Zuni - Tuesday, July 8, 2003 - link
Flash is less than a 200k download, dialup can handle that no problem. GIF/PNG are 2-3 times the size of flash graphs. Over 80% of the internet uses flash, so do we at this time.Anonymous User - Tuesday, July 8, 2003 - link
What's with the Flash charts? I filter all Flash/Shockwave content so I see a big nothing there. Please revert to a standard like GIF or PNG! Thanks.