Benchmarks III
UT2003 Demo's next. 1024x768x32. Concentrating on the flybys. This has an added significance for yours truly as he was thumped rather badly in it last night. At least the machine isn't to blame.
The Flyby section is considered to be the one that's card limited. In view of this, 200FSB does help boost scores a little. Of course, we're running a slightly faster Barton in place of a standard 166FSB Athlon XP
Quake III rounds it up.
Performance discussion
The EPoX carries a comprehensive BIOS that allows you to toggle with almost every performance parameter. Excellent voltages, both in the level offered and the consistency under load give the 8RDA3+ excellent stability when run at the now stock 200FSB and when overclocked to 220FSB and beyond. It's difficult to gauge just how good the new Ultra version of the SPP is. We have no other comparison motherboards at present. A quick test was undertaken by using an XP2700 CPU at its native 166FSB. The 8RDA3+ managed to equal or just beat the NF7-S in the majority of memory-dependant benchmarks. That tells us that it's fast straight out of the box.
Needless to say that the 8RDA3+ and XP3200+ combination are perfect performance partners. The 200FSB may not have done as much for the Barton as it did for the Pentium 4, although we do feel that an increase in FSB was necessary. The 8RDA3+ is well placed to run each and every Athlon XP before the Hammer variant ship in force.
