AMD AM2 Digital Home - ASUS M2NPV-VM Motherboard

Vote: Thumbs Down or Thumbs Up Our Rating: 8.0%       Manufacturer: ASUS

Test System Setup

Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (Socket AM2)

Memory: 2x 1GB DDR2-1066 Corsair (Supplied by Corsair)

Hard Disk: 500GB Seagate 7200.9 (Supplied by Seagate)

Graphics Card: nVidia GeForce 7800GT

Cooling: Gigabyte NeonK8 (Supplied by Gigabyte)

Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP SP2

Drivers: nVidia nForce Platform Driver 8.26, nVidia ForceWare 91.31 and DX9c

Today we are pitting the ASUS M2NVP-VM motherboard against our other Digital Home contender, the Foxconn 6150K8MD motherboard which we found to be quite a good HTPC contender when we first tested it.

We are doing all of benchmarks at stock speeds as both these motherboards don’t like overclocking and if you’re looking at buying either of these boards, you’ll more than likely be using them as a Media Center PC and not for gaming or setting a new 3DMark world record.

Let’s move onto our testing and see how each performs. We’ll run every test with discrete graphics (GeForce 7800GT) and with the onboard nVidia graphics.

SiSoft Sandra

Version and / or Patch Used: 2007

Developer Homepage: http://www.sisoftware.co.uk

Product Homepage: http://sisoftware.jaggedonline.com/index.php?location=home&a=TTA&lang=en

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SiSoft Sandra (System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is a synthetic Windows benchmark that features different tests used to evaluate different PC subsystems.

Memory performance when the onboard graphics system is enabled drops a bit since some of the actual memory and the bandwidth are being hogged by the GeForce Northbridge. However, it isn’t a big a drop as when Intel graphics systems are enabled on GMCH based systems - way to go nVidia.