System setup and notes
Here's a quick rundown of the test system should you wish to compare benchmark results with your own.- Intel Pentium4 2800MHz S478 Northwood CPU
- MSI E7205 'Granite Bay' GNB-MAX motherboard run in official DDR266 mode in both dual and single-DDR modes
- ABIT IT7-MAX2 v2.0 i845PE run in official DDR333 mode
- Gigabyte 8IHXP i850E motherboard run with PC1066 memory
- MSI SiS648 MAX motherboard run in DDR333 mode
- SOYO P4X400 DRAGON run in DDR333 mode
- ABIT IT7-MAX i845E motherboard run in official DDR266 mode.
Common components
- ATi Radeon 9700 Pro (324/320)
- 256MB Corsair XMS3200 C2 run at 2-5-2-2 for all motherboards
- 256MB Mushkin PC3200 used for dual-DDR operation on the MSI Granite Bay motherboard.
- 61.5GB IBM 120GXP Hard Drive.
- Liteon 16x DVD
- Samcheer 420w PSU
- Samsung 181T TFT monitor
- Thermaltake S478 cooler
- Alpha 8942 with 26cfm YSTech fan
Software
- Windows XP Professional Build 2600.xpclient.010817-1148
- Intel chipset drivers
- Intel application accelerator drivers
- SiS 1.12 AGP drivers
- VIA 4-in-1s, 4.43
- Plutonium XP 8.1 Radeon Drivers (based on ATI CATALYST build 6166)
- SiSoft SANDRA SP1
- Pifast v41
- LAME MP3 encoding using U2's Pop album at 192 kb/s
- Virtual Dub 1.4.10 DVD encoding, DivX 4.12 CODEC
- OcUK SETI benchmark
- 3DMark 2001SE
- UT2003 Demo
- Comanche 4 benchmark
- Serious Sam 2 Demo
- Quake 3 v1.30
Notes
6 chipsets with 7 sets of benchmarks (2 for the GB motherboard, single and dual-DDR) should make this a fairly comprehensive roundup of the Pentium 4's current motherboard options. Each chipset is being run at its official specifications. All benchmarks were carried out at 1024x768x32 unless otherwise stated. Benchmarks were run 3 times and the highest and lowest results were discarded. Although the dual-DDR benchmarks include 512MB of RAM, and all the others use 256MB, testing the MSI in single-DDR mode with either 256M or 512MB showed no statistical significant variation between results.
Overclocking
With no voltage adjustment or AGP/PCI lock on this particular BIOS version, overclocking was always going to be poor. I managed to get up to 146FSB using MSI's Windows-based Fuzzy Logic overclocking tool. The test Radeon 9700 Pro began to freeze indiscriminately at any FSB over 146. This was not a chipset limitation, but more of a BIOS and AGP card limitation. I had really hoped for an AGP/PCI lock coupled with extensive voltage options. Even now I can't make my mind up whether motherboard is aimed at the server or desktop market.
Stability
Stability was excellent with no crashes or anomalies at stock speeds. It passes a 13-hour DivX encoding test without any problems. I have to state that I could only populate up to 2 DIMM slots at any one time due to a lack of suitable RAM.
With a theoretical 4.26GB/s of bandwidth, this should be one fast motherboard. Let's see just how it fares as we put it through our benchmark run.
