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In the beginning of this article we mentioned that the driver package supplied by Shuttle did not include nVidia's IDE drivers, and that we used the nVidia reference drivers to install them instead. The effect of these drivers on the IDE performance is quite dramatic, both in terms of burst speed optimization and in terms of CPU usage during HDD transfers.

Without the nVidia IDE drivers, the performance does not look too shabby, however, it is achieved at a very high CPU overhead of 57%. In addition, the burst rates are limited to some 89 MB/sec that would be ok for an ATA100 drive but not necessarily for an ATA133 drive running off an ATA133 controller.

After installation of the nVidia IDE drivers that were autodetected by the system, the HDD performance takes a quantum leap while CPU utilization drops to 20% of what we showed above when using the standard MicroSoft drivers.

Content Creation Winstone2002

All benchmarks were run after installation of the nVidia IDE drivers. Based on the small level of interference of the IGP and its memory bandwidth requirements, we did not expect much performance drop in desktop applications either, that is, in applications that would not stress the 3D engine but mostly CPU, memory and I/O performance. With the latter approaching the design limitations of the ATA7 specifications, it is not surprising that the results returned are at the top of their class. Surprising, however, even though we should have anticipated something like this is the almost nonexisting delta between the use of the IGP and the Tyan Radeon 9700, showing once again the incredible efficacy of the nVidia TwinBank architecture in situations of simultaneous memory accesses from both the CPU and AGP as the main memory bandwidth hogs.

The SN41G2 with either IGP or external AGP and the ASUS A7V8X are in a tight group with the SN41G2 in both first and third place. Note how much performance delta shows on the SK41 between the internal graphics and external AGP configurations. Once again the performance of the SN41G2 and, by extension, the nForce2 chipset is extremely impressive.

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