Systems setup and notes
Hardware and Software
Test Platforms
| EPoX EP-5LWA+ System | NVIDIA nForce4 SLI Intel Edition System | Athlon 64 S939 PCI-Express System | |
| Processor(s) | Intel Pentium 4 660 | Intel Pentium 4 660 | AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 |
| Mainboard | EPoX EP-5LWA+ 925XE | NVIDIA nForce4 SLI Intel Edition | ABIT AX8 K8T890 |
| Memory | 1GByte (2x512MB) Crucial Ballistix DDR2-667 | 1GByte (2x512MB) Crucial Ballistix DDR2-667 | 1GByte (2x512MB) Corsair XMS3200 | Memory timings | 4-4-4-12 | 4-4-4-12 | 2-2-2-5 1T |
| Graphics Card | ATI RADEON X850 XT PE - PEG16X - CATALYST 5.3 | Disk Drive | 160GB WD IDE & 36GB SATA Raptor |
| BIOS Version | 23rd February 2005 | BIOS 10 - 25th February 2005 | |
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional, SP2 | ||
| Mainboard Software | Intel INF Update Utility 6.3.0.1007 | nForce4 7.02 platform driver | VIA Hyperion Pro v4.55 |
Benchmark Software
HEXUS.in-house Cryptography Benchmark
HEXUS Pifast Benchmark
ScienceMark 2.0 (7th February 2005)
Realstorm 2004
CINEBENCH 2003 multi-CPU render
HEXUS.in-house MP3 Encoding Benchmark using LAME 3.97a (Intel HT compiler) - 701MB WAV
picCOLOR 32-bit v4.0
Kribibench v1.1.9
Microsoft Movie Maker 2.1
USB2.0 transfer test
DOOM 3 Timedemo 1
3DMark2001SE b330
UT2003 Bot Match
Notes
The EPoX EP-5LWA+ will be compared to a very new, very real NVIDIA nForce4 SLI Intel Edition reference motherboard that was launched just days ago. Further, competition will be provided by a VIA K8T890 motherboard run with an AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 processor. There were no problems to report during installation or testing. Rock-solid stability, as usual.
Clock speeds were as follows:
3630.8MHz - EPoX 5LWA+ - Intel Pentium 4 660
3608.5MHz - NVIDIA nForce4 SLI Intel Edition - Intel Pentium 4 660 -
2405.4MHz -ABIT AX8 VIA K8T890 - AMD Athlon 64 FX-53
Note that EPoX's 5LWA+ has a 22MHz speed advantage over NVIDIA's reference board. This will affect results to some degree.
Overclocking
266MHz FSB is the chipset's rated speed. After installing a semi-unlocked Pentium 4 570J (3.8GHz), dropping the mulitplier down to 14x, and raising bus speed to the maximum stable limit, a solid 290MHz FSB was achieved. Any higher and the system would sporadically reboot under load. 300MHz+ FSB also caused rebooting problems, where the board wouldn't initialise correctly. Of course, each sample is different, and you may achieve 300MHz+, components permitting, with comparative ease. In fact, I'd expect 300MHz+ from most 5LWA+s.
