MSI P4N Diamond & Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI

Test Setup:

Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz (512KB L2, 2MB L3); 2 x 512MB Corsair 5400UL DDR2 (operating at 533MHz in dual channel with 4.0-4-4-12 timings); NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT (operating at 350/1000MHz); Western Digital Raptor 74GB; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA ForceWare 71.89 WHQL.

Motherboards:

• MSI P4N Diamond (NForce 4 SLI Intel Edition);
  
• Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI Royal (NForce 4 SLI Intel Edition);
  
• Intel D925XCV (Intel 925X).

We also tested the MSI P4N Diamond and Gigabyte GA-8N-SLI Royal with an Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz on the following system configuration:

Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz (2MB L2); 2x 512MB Corsair 5400UL DDR2 (operating at 533MHz in dual channel with 3.0-2-2-8 timings); 2x NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT PCI-Express (operating at 350/1000MHz in both single card and SLI modes); Western Digital Raptor 74GB; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA Forceware 71.89 WHQL.

General Performance:

Summary

As we can see, SLI makes little or no difference to general performance when it is enabled, while the the NForce 4 SLI chipset is faster than Intel's 925X in general performance scenarios. The GA-8N-SLI is slightly faster in SuperPI with the 3.73EE installed, but falls behind in our unbuffered memory bandwidth test.