TechSpot - PC Technology News and Analysis

Hardware
AMD Athlon64 3800+ Socket AM2
AMD Athlon64 3800+ Socket 939-pin
1GB Corsair XMS DDR800 CAS4
1GB Corsair XMS DDR400 CAS2
ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe (nForce 590 SLI)
Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI (nForce4 SLI)
- OCZ GameXStream (700 watt)
Seagate 250GB 7200RPM (Serial ATA II)
ATI Radeon X1900XTX
Software
- WinXP 32bit - Microsoft Windows XP Pro (SP2)
- WinXP 32bit - NVIDIA Forceware 91.31
- WinXP 32bit - NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI 9.35
- WinXP 32bit - nForce 570 SLI-570-550 9.16

Subsystem Testing

The Serial ATA II performance seems slightly better on the new nForce 590 SLI chipset, as it sustained a transfer rate of 3MB/s more on average. The USB 2.0 performance on the other hand was much the same. As many have already discovered, the gaming performance of the AM2 platform is quite disappointing so far. Despite this the Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI was actually slower than the ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe by a small margin in the 3Dmark2003 audio test.