Biostar TForce4 U 775

Testing Methods:

With the exception of SiSoft Sandra's unbuffered memory bandwidth benchmark - which, incidentally, measures real memory bandwidth when you need it most - all of our benchmarks have been engineered to give you numbers that you are likely to find useful when actually using the products we have evaluated in the real world. There are plans to increase the number of benchmarks over time and we're running additional tests that will not be published until we have enough products to make a reasonable comparison.

We are also focusing a lot more of our time on evaluating the stability of the motherboards (and platforms) using a stress test designed to highlight any of the potential weaknesses that the product may have. That involves a gradually increasing amount of stress starting with Prime95 and expanding to IOMeter and 3DMark05 if all is well. This is to ensure that all parts of the system are stressed simultaneously over a period of time.

We believe that the consumer is never likely to subject their platform to this level of stress and we are not expecting every product to complete an entire extended stress test. However, most poorly engineered products fail within the first couple of hours, or even minutes, allowing us to make a conscious decision on whether a motherboard (or platform) is worth your money, regardless of how well it performs in our benchmarks.

Test Setup:

Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz (operating at 3733MHz - 14x266); Biostar TForce4 U 775 (NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra Intel Edition); 2 x 512MB Corsair 5400UL (operating in dual channel at 667MHz with 4.0-2-2-8-1T timings); 1 x BFGTech GeForce 7800 GT OC (operating at 425/1050MHz); Seagate 7200.9 200GB 7,200RPM SATA II hard disk drive; OCZ PowerStream 600W power supply unit; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA Forceware 82.12.

Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz (operating at 3733MHz - 14x266); Intel D975XBX (Intel 975X/ICH7R); 2 x 512MB Corsair 5400UL (operating in dual channel at 667MHz with 4.0-2-2-8-1T timings); 1 x BFGTech GeForce 7800 GT OC (operating at 425/1050MHz); Seagate 7200.9 200GB 7,200RPM SATA II hard disk drive; OCZ PowerStream 600W power supply unit; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA Forceware 82.12.

AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (operating at 2800MHz - 14x200); DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR (NVIDIA nForce4 SLI); 2 x 512MB Corsair 3200XL Pro (operating in dual channel at 400MHz with 2.0-2-2-7-1T timings); 1 x BFGTech GeForce 7800 GT OC (operating at 425/1050MHz); Seagate 7200.9 200GB 7,200RPM SATA II hard disk drive; OCZ PowerStream 600W power supply unit; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA Forceware 82.12.

AMD Athlon 64 FX-57 (operating at 2800MHz - 14x200); ASUS A8R-MVP (ATI CrossFire Xpress 200); 2 x 512MB Corsair 3200XL Pro (operating in dual channel at 400MHz with 2.0-2-2-7-1T timings); 1 x BFGTech GeForce 7800 GT OC (operating at 425/1050MHz); Seagate 7200.9 200GB 7,200RPM SATA II hard disk drive; OCZ PowerStream 600W power supply unit; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA Forceware 82.12.

Memory Performance:

The Biostar TForce4 U 775 delivered significantly higher memory bandwidth compared to the Intel D975XBX Desktop Board.