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LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: Willy, Woody and Scotty Coolers R'Us Enhanced Power Management Specs and Names testConfiguration NX vs. DX Memory Bandwidth Latencies WorldBench5 -1 WorldBench5 -2 3dsmax More 3D Rendering Cinebench2003 Gaming FutureMarks Conclusions Give Us Some Feedback on this Review
Intel Pentium4 600 Series
(Review by MS February 21, 2005)

Deny Execution

In the past, we found that enabling the deny execution bit can be a tricky issue - a number of standard applications such as some graphics benchmarks can be terminated by DX. Amongst other issues, this might have influenced the decision at Microsoft to constrain DEP by default to kernel processes and services. Likewise DX is disabled by default in the BIOS of the mainboards we have looked at (except for Intel's own board), unless DX is manually enabled, it won't show as being supported.

Without manually enabling DX in the BIOS, the control panel shows the error message displayed at the bottom of this screenshot.

Likewise, attempting to run NXTest by Robert Schlabbach will terminate at the first step:

The comment is self-explanatory.

After setting the DX entry to enabled, the error message disappears. Note that the DEP tab in the control panel was set manually to "all programs" as opposed to the default (upper checkbox).

NXTest executes as specified.

There is more to that story, though. On the AMD Athlon64 systems tested, NXTest went through several loops until it finally terminated with the above shown error message. No such loops occur with the P4660 or ExtremeEdition, the executable is launched and immediately thereafter, the screenshot shown above appears. In other words, there appears to be a fundamental difference in how DX vs. NX is handled by the different architectures but that is all we know at the time being.

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